Funded Projects Call 2

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is experiencing a fast process of commodification, reaching the society at large. The scope of AMNESIA is to explore and assess the technical feasibility and commercial potential of measuring algorithmic unfairness of AI-based tools and models made available by FAAMG1 that are at the basis of Future Interactive Technologies (FIT) solutions (chatbots, ranking tools, etc.): ensuring that sensitive information (e.g., gender, race, sexual or political orientation) does not unfairly influence the learning process and the predictions of data-driven models.

In the book "Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust" (Kevin Werbach, 2018) the author describes different 'trust architectures': Peer-to-Peer trust (build up from personal relationships, people trusting each other pairwise) , Leviathan trust (Institutional trust in the legal system and a social contract with the state) , Intermediary trust (with a central entity managing transactions between (untrusting) people, e.g. the credit card system).

The 4th trust architecture is Distributed trust. It is a new kind of trust that e.g. Blockchain offers us.

Blockchain shifts some of the trust in people & institutions to trust in technology. But Blockchain doesn't eliminate the need to trust human institutions. Blockchain is very good at offering cryptographic trust but it doesn't address the issue of Human Trust. To the contrary it is built on foundations of mutual mistrust.

In this Bitoftrust project we will present a different kind of Distributed trust architecture in which the starting point is not the privacy of Self and a mistrust of others but the reality that Human trust in essence is about Intimacy with others and starts from a private relationship of intimate trust as first building block to extended relationships of intimate trust.

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE)

COSCA outputs a conceptual Framework for car security, drivers’ privacy and trust enhancement, thus orienting the Next Generation Internet at its core.

Innovatively taking a socio-technical approach, the COSCA Framework rests on crowdsourced drivers’ perceptions and hence is rooted in the human beings that are actual users of the car technologies. COSCA also adopts a GDPR-inspired classification of the data collected by cars and treated by manufacturers, paying particular attention to cases that treat special categories of data such as biometric data.

Upon such bases, COSCA conducts a risk assessment exercise inspired to an ISO/IEC methodology conveniently tailored for car security risks and drivers’ privacy risks. The outcome of this exercise offers a compact yet expressive view of the security measures that would be necessary to mitigate the found risks and improve the car technologies, ultimately producing a more trustworthy system that combines, at least, car and driver.

CryptPad is a web-based suite of end-to-end-encrypted collaborative tools released under the AGPL. It is freely available with nearly 300 instances available online, however, the software is primarily developed by a single company sustaining itself via subscriptions to hosted services, support contracts, and donations. We are seeking financial support to prototype a small collection of technologies which would both address some security concerns and make us more competitive against proprietary services.

Like other zero knowledge offerings available on the web, CryptPad delivers on the cloud 's promises of availability without violating user privacy. It does so by applying strong encryption and managing keys on users' devices before anything is shared over the network. Unfortunately, since such platforms target the web via JavaScript, users remain vulnerable to malicious code deployed to their server either by any means.

Article 9 of the UN convention of the rights of persons with disabilities requires countries to take measures for the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities (including access to communication and information services) and the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 also calls for the principle of accessibility at all levels. Despite this, there are still about 1 million deaf and hard of hearing persons in Europe who currently rely on outdated technology (e.g. fax) and help from others to make an emergency call.

The good news is that existing standards and technologies can provide an adequate and barrier- free solution. DEC112 (Deaf Emergency Call System) already implemented an emergency infrastructure (compliant to NENA NG9-1-1 and ETSI TS 103479) including a mobile app to enable deaf and hard of hearing persons to access emergency services in Austria. This solution is in operation since February 2019. A lot has been learned about the actual needs of emergency callers as well as call takers in control rooms. In the proposed project we want to implement and disseminate new features for DEC112

Taler Systems S.A.

Berner Fachhochschule

Registrations of accounts prior to receiving services online is the standard process for commercial offerings on the Internet which depend on two corner stones of the Web: Payment processing and digital identities. The use of third-party identity provider services (IdPs) is practical as it delegates the task of verifying and storing personal information. The use of payment processors is convenient for the customer as it provides one-click payments. However, the quasi-oligopoly of services providers in those areas include Google and Facebook for identities and PayPal or Stripe for payment processing. Those corporations are not only based in privacy-unfriendly jurisdictions, but also exploit private data for profit.

We make the case that what is urgently needed are fundamentally different, user-centric and privacy- friendly alternatives to the above. We argue that self-sovereign identity (SSI) management is the way to replace IdPs with a user-centric, decentralized mechanism where data and access control is fully under the control of the data subject. In combination with a privacy-friendly payment system, we aim to achieve the same one-click user experience that is currently achieved by privacy-invasive account- based Web shops, but without the users having to setup accounts.