Two TPM spin-off companies receive NWO Take-off funding
Both the Participative Value Evaluation company of Niek Mouter, Shannon Spruit and Anatol Itten, as Councyl, Caspar Chorus' company in which Delft Enterprises also participates, receive NWO Take-off funding. With this grant they can boost their innovative companies in the field of citizen participation and reliable artificial intelligence and bring scientific knowledge to the market.
Citizen participation
Participative Value Evaluation (PVE) is a scientifically based method to involve citizens in a low-threshold way in the evaluation of policy options. Citizens are put in the seat of the policy maker, as it were. They experience what choice the policy maker has to make, they get an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the options to choose from and then are asked what they would advise. These recommendations can be used to determine the social value of government policy, and PVE is also a concrete method to facilitate mass participation of citizens in public decision-making. Finally, PVE makes citizens aware of the complexity of issues that policy makers face.
Human compass for artificial intelligence
With enormous amounts of available data, the automation of business and government processes can be improved by so-called 'Machine learning' techniques from Artificial Intelligence (Al). However, such algorithms are not transparent. As a result, it is no longer clear to humans on what the AI bases its advice and decisions; as a result, we no longer know whether the underlying motivations of the Al correspond to the (moral) values of the organisation and society as a whole. This loss of human control (or fear of it) leads to significant and justified social concerns, and organisations' reluctance to use Al. This also means that much potential economic value is lost, for example due to lost productivity growth. Council uses moral choice experiments and mathematical (econometric) models of moral decision making to equip artificial intelligence with a transparent and explainable 'compass' that is inspired by human choices.
About NWO Take-off
The NWO science-wide funding instrument Take-off stimulates activity and entrepreneurship from Dutch knowledge institutes. Academic entrepreneurs, but also starters from universities of applied sciences and starters who make use of knowledge of institutions for Applied Research Organisations, can use this to market their innovative research results. Take-off is one of the tools for knowledge utilisation that NWO carries out together with ZonMw.
