South Korea is leading international standardization of artificial intelligence (AI). After an ad-hoc group proposed by the country to an international committee was established, a South Korean expert was named as the leader of the group. The country is receiving attention globally as it leads discussions on international standards in various fields such as data quality and credibility.
Korea Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) and National Radio Research Agency (RRA) announced on Tuesday that 33 experts from industries, universities, research institutes, and from the government participated in the “6th artificial intelligence international standards meeting (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC42)” that was held online from October 20 to 30 as the group that represented South Korea.
An ad-hoc group was established by a proposal from the South Korean group during a meeting in order to standardize “AI service ecosystem” and it appointed Professor Cho Young-im of Gachon University to be the leader of the group.
The ad-hoc group will prepare new international standards for “AI service ecosystem” through participations from experts around the globe and receive approvals during a next meeting. It expects that new standards will establish roles and requirements between each element and people involved such as suppliers, consumers, and service providers within AI-based industries and contribute to vitalizing AI services in the future.
The South Korean group shared the result from operating an AI data ad-hoc group that South Korea has led for the past year. It plans to carry on discussions to propose new international standards related to “AI data framework”.
Professor Lee Jae-ho of University of Seoul suggested “guidelines for development of AI system that is able to provide explanations” as a new project. His suggestion involves raising AI’s reliability in various situations such as providing explanations to consumers on decisions and reasons made behind a loan evaluation process. His project is expected to be chosen as a new project early next year.
New international standardization process of South Korea’s “Machine Learning Data Quality” project that was selected back in April is also ongoing. Corresponding proposal focuses on improving quality data that are inputted in AI system and securing interoperation between system and data. South Korea has been leading standardization process of proposals on summary of data quality and definition of terms.
Professor Kim Kyung-min of Ewha Womans University announced and publicized a need to push for standardization of “AI governance guideline” that has been gaining attention recently. Corresponding guideline involves supervisory and management plans for minimizing risks such as personal information leakage that can be caused by automatic decision-making by AI.
“South Korea has made many contributions towards expanding the range of projects related to AI international standardization.” said Lee Seung-woo who is the director of KATS. “We plan to hold a workshop with RRA this month in order to promote cooperation between departments and active participation from the industrial world and the research circles.” He also emphasized that the government will not hold back any support in order to have the country become one of the leaders in AI international standardization as soon as possible.
Staff Reporter Yun, Heeseok | pioneer@etnews.com