Safe AI Tech Chat: Founding a Trustworthy AI Community

Tarek R. Besold, Head of Strategic AI at DEKRA DIGITAL, and Mirko Knaak, Head of AI Safety at IAV, are hosting an in-person chat on Safe AI on the AI Campus. Join the exciting chat!

“Safe AI” or “trustworthy AI” are currently leitmotifs of many discussion rounds, white papers, legislative initiatives, and standardization proposals. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have at least one thing in common: They do not go into the details of the concrete implementation of the security goals for individual AIs. What is also needed, though, is a discussion on a more applied level with questions such as, "Which security architecture is suitable?", "How can I prove the sufficiency of the amount of data used for training of a model?", etc.

Already having had some casual conversations within the Berlin AI ecosystem in the last few months, IAV and DEKRA DIGITAL now want to take the next step of community building by creating a forum for the exchange of ideas in a relaxed atmosphere in a larger group.

Their short-term goals are to build a budding community of various “safe AI”/” trustworthy AI” players from research, industry, startups, conformity auditors, and regulatory authorities, and to share experiences regarding best practices in various (already regulated) industries.

In the long term, they can imagine a lot more, such as joint projects or collections of best practices in a playbook targeting general audiences.

Tarek R. Besold

Dr. Tarek R. Besold is Head of Strategic AI at DEKRA DIGITAL. Before taking up his role in the management team of the DEKRA AI Hub, which was founded in 2020, he held various positions as CTO at a Berlin deep-tech start-up, as Chief Science Officer of Telefonica's Digital Health Moonshot in Barcelona, and as Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Data Science at City, University of London. Tarek completed his PhD in 2014 at the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück on topics at the interface between cognition and AI. He is chairman of the DIN standardization committee for Artificial Intelligence (NA 043-01-42 AA) and a member of the AI expert advisory board of Microsoft Germany.

Mirko Knaak

Holding a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he has more than 20 years of experience in artificial intelligence (AI) with affiliation with several renowned research institutions and research-oriented companies. He is co-author of more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. His second professional passion is international business. After his study in this field in Washington DC, he was the managing director of an engineering company in Japan where he lived in 2000th years, closely integrated in the scientific exchange about AI. Currently, he is focusing on the digital transformation in the business unit “digital solutions” of the tech solution provider IAV in Berlin. This includes the technical side of the transformation like AI as well the digital mindset including agile organizations and design thinking. His current main topic is the assurance of AI – safeAI.