Article by Axel Schwanke: “..The EU AI Act emphasizes sustainable AI through robust data governance, promoting principles like data minimization, purpose limitation, and data quality to ensure responsible data collection and processing. It mandates measures such as data protection impact assessments and retention policies. Article 10 underscores the importance of effective data management in fostering ethical and sustainable AI development…This article states that high-risk AI systems must be developed using high-quality data sets for training, validation, and testing. These data sets should be managed properly, considering factors like data collection processes, data preparation, potential biases, and data gaps. The data sets should be relevant, representative, error-free, and complete as much as possible. They should also consider the specific context in which the AI system will be used. In some cases, providers may process special categories of personal data to detect and correct biases, but they must follow strict conditions to protect individuals’ rights and freedoms…
However, achieving compliance presents several significant challenges:
- Ensuring Dataset Quality and Relevance: Organizations must establish robust data and AI platforms to prepare and manage datasets that are error-free, representative, and contextually relevant for their intended use cases. This requires rigorous data preparation and validation processes.
- Bias and Contextual Sensitivity: Continuous monitoring for biases in data is critical. Organizations must implement corrective actions to address gaps while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations, especially when processing personal data to detect and reduce bias.
- End-to-End Traceability: A comprehensive data governance framework is essential to track and document data flow from its origin to its final use in AI models. This ensures transparency, accountability, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Evolving Data Requirements: Dynamic applications and changing schemas, particularly in industries like real estate, necessitate ongoing updates to data preparation processes to maintain relevance and accuracy.
- Secure Data Processing: Compliance demands strict adherence to secure processing practices for personal data, ensuring privacy and security while enabling bias detection and mitigation.
Example: Real Estate Data
Immowelt’s real estate price map, awarded as the top performer in a 2022 test of real estate price maps, exemplifies the challenges of achieving high-quality datasets. The prepared data powers numerous services and applications, including data analysis, price predictions, personalization, recommendations, and market research…(More)”