good ideas rarely arise at the touch of a button. Rather, they need intellectual freedom as well as various teams contributing different experiences and perspectives if something genuinely new is to emerge. It is precisely this creative culture that we want to encourage with our idea contest on the Civic Innovation Platform. In a preliminary elevator pitch, 36 project teams presented their concept ideas for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications providing benefits for the common good before a panel of experts. You can find out which ideas will be honored on March 10.

Constructive ideas were also on the agenda at the virtual conference held under the OECD’s AI-WIPS programme, which we are strongly supporting. Over a total of five days, international experts and interested parties from politics, science, business, and civil society discussed such things as an OECD-developed classification system for AI applications and the role of ethics in the use of machine intelligence.

As well as this, we continued our “Human-technology interaction – working with AI” dialogue series on February 25. This time, we are going to explore the role played by AI in (popular) culture and ask what contribution the cultural sector can make to stimulate the socially oriented adoption of technology.

This week the AI Observatory is celebrating its first birthday! As we review the progress we made last year we are committed to continue our work on a participatory design of AI in work and society.

We wish you pleasant reading!

The Policy Lab team