BACKGROUND & RATIONALE

The purpose of the EU Project TAILOR is to build the capacity to provide the scientific foundations for Trustworthy AI in Europe by developing a network of research excellence centres leveraging and combining learning, optimisation, and reasoning. These systems are meant to provide descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive systems integrating data-driven and knowledge-based approaches.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown in the last ten years at an unprecedented pace. It has been applied to many industrial and service sectors, becoming ubiquitous in our everyday life. More and more often, AI systems are used to suggest decisions to human experts, to propose actions, and to provide predictions. Because these systems might influence our life and have a significant impact on the way we decide, they need to be trustworthy. How can a radiologist trust an AI system analysing medical images? How can a financial broker trust an AI system providing stock price predictions? How can a passenger trust a self-driving car?
These are fundamental questions that require deep analysis and fundamental research activity as well as a new generation of AI talents who are skilled in the scientific foundations of Trustworthy AI, who know how to assess, and how to design, trustworthy AI systems. Some of the current issues related to lack of trust in AI systems are a direct consequence of the massive use of black-box methods relying only on data. We need to define the foundations of a new generation of AI systems not only relying on data-driven approaches, but also on the whole set of AI techniques, including symbolic AI methods, optimization, reasoning, and planning.