What is ELSA?
European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (ELSA) is a growing network of excellence that spearheads efforts in foundational safe and secure AI methodology research. ELSA builds on and extends the internationally recognized and excellently positioned ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) network of excellence.
ELSA is based on the understanding that safe and secure AI can only be achieved by building on foundational research. Relying on heuristics alone is susceptible to arms races and will not yield appreciable, reliable or sustainable levels of safety or security and is prone to fail overcoming the key obstacles in shaping AI in compliance with our European values. ELSA will overcome this by combining rigorous approaches such as robustness certification and differential privacy with machine learning and deep learning that are ubiquitous in applications. Hence, ELSA is based on a research agenda that encompasses the key research directions and fosters vital research by bringing together researchers across communities as well as different stakeholders. The research community is unified and directed towards addressing grand challenges that reach across use-cases by benchmarks that will drive innovation and provide measurable progress. The use-cases call for different, domain-specific requirements and risk analysis that require solutions, tools, and software that overcome obstacles in a trustworthy approach that conforms with legal and ethical principles grounded on European values. Our investigations emphasize state of the art methodology and technology (with a particular focus on Deep Learning techniques) in order to ensure practical relevance of the solutions.
ELSA comprises the four research programmes
1. Technical Robustness and Safety,
2. Privacy-Preserving Techniques and Infrastructure,
3. Human Agency and Oversight, and
4. ELSA Innovation Lab
that interact with the ELLIS research programmes.
The ELSA network
ELSA's founding members include European experts in all aspects of safe and secure AI, including technical robustness, privacy preserving techniques and human agency and oversight. In addition, ELSA brings on board research and industry experts in six different sectors that are key application areas of safe and secure AI.
It comprises 21 ELLIS units and 44 network partners all over Europe.
