Advancing Trust-Based Digital Societies

With the disruption, also new threats are emerging. The technologies can be misused, the security of the systems and data compromised, creating wide-reaching implications at individual and societal level. To prevent and mitigate the threats new innovations that promote trust are required. There is a real need for trusted digital services in society especially in financial, health & social care and energy sector, along with all critical infrastructure. Through the Tietoevry Veturi program, Trusted Digital Societies, we aim to drive the global transformation and create a benchmark for affordable, accessible, and trusted digital services for citizens globally.

Market dominated by big players and regulation

The digital world is being dominated by few global players, who have expanded their reach into different areas of society. This oligopoly is not without problems, especially when few players (companies) originate from Europe, and do not have the same legal or societal base. The EU (European Union)-level regulation – General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), medical device regulation and the new draft Artificial Intelligence Act for example – creates boundaries for businesses on how the technologies should be used, but also create opportunities to those able to offer solutions for addressing existing and future challenges. 

Secure communication is vital in the age of Industry 4.0 & 5.0

Next generation (5G/6G) connectivity is bringing new features such as low latency, location etc. But it is not only social media browsing and faster audiovisual content streaming. It is going beyond that and will transform the society and will impact each corner such as industry, finance, health & wellbeing, entertainment etc. In the new connectivity low latency combined with guaranteed band will have an enormous impact on digital services. In the case of industry 4.0 and beyond, it will not only change the industry equipment size but efficiency significantly.  

Especially indoor location added with connectivity will have an enormous impact on industry automation and raise many Security and Privacy concerns. Currently industry is using mostly wired connectivity with Internet-Of-Things (IoTs) and enjoying security gap. This gap will be evaporated with 5G/6G connectivity even in private networks. As the 5G/6G connectivity signal will be in the air, it can be detected even outside the industry area. At least the connectivity duration and time of the connection is available to a third-party listener. It will reveal the industry working time and duration up to some extent. Besides security and privacy of factory functioning, privacy of an individual working in the 5G/6G connectivity can also be tracked more precisely as indoor location is embedded in the signal.  

AI must be human-centric and trustworthy

5G/6G connectivity will bring new possibilities for industry automation and safety of the individual working in the area. Automation will have more autonomous components that will heavily depend on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It raises the importance of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in a different context. 

Human and AI interaction is one of the main aspects. How do we train the AI models for different tasks or retrain (fine-tune) it? What kind of data is used? It is vital to understand the bias in the data along with the bonds and limitations of the data used in either training/re-training/fine-tuning. As most of the models are working in a narrow area (or few tasks), it is important to understand the working of the AI model in the narrow area, but it is vital to comprehend the working of it in the overflow areas or related areas (in the exceptional use-cases). AI models must work well (degrade gracefully) and neither cause any harm to the equipment nor to the environment where they are operating. At depth we are looking for a trustworthy AI that is robust, stable, explainable, unbiased, and generalized. 

It can be achieved by using trusted reliable digital services with secure communication and trustworthy AI that will be compliant with EU values and regulations. For that we suggest using external third-party audit for the offering (digital services) along with opensource data and AI platform which will build the transparency and trust on the offering. 

Join the ecosystem!

The changing digital world creates new opportunities for those able to offer trusted digital services in society especially in financial, health/social care and energy sector, along with all critical infrastructures.

In the Veturi programme, Tietoevry is initiating research collaboration in horizontal technologies – including trustworthy AI and secure communications – to enable long-term business infrastructure, to establish common technology-specific platforms and to ensure compliance to EU-level acts and regulations. We welcome companies, start-ups and research groups to join the ecosystem for building joint technology capabilities around the strategic themes.