DP News – Week 36. Sweden strives for sustainable digitalisation

Sweden’s data protection authority, IMY, has launched a pilot project setting up a new way of joint work with regulatory challenges posed by decentralised AI.

As IMY clarifies, “decentralised AI is a way to avoid collection of large amounts of data to train algorithms centrally and instead send out models that are trained locally. The trained algorithms are then brought back to a central point where insights are aggregated”.

The pilot project will involve three different participants: Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Region Halland, and the Swedish national centre for applied artificial intelligence (AI Sweden).

IMY explains that the development of AI brings great opportunities, which, however, go hand-in-hand with legal challenges, meaning that application of AI technologies requires individuals’ privacy and personal data to be protected in a good way.

With this in mind, during the autumn 2022, the participants will receive in-depth legal guidance from IMY in matters relating to decentralised AI. They will be able to test their ideas and approaches in collaboration with IMY and receive the supervisory authority’s support in conducting legal assessments. As IMY suggests, this will allow the participants to learn more about applicable regulations, while for the supervisory authority this would be an opportunity to better understand the current issues raised by the industry.

The pilot project will result in a public report that is expected to be issued in early 2023. Thus, more actors can benefit from the work done.

On 20 september, the pilot project with regulatory testing activities will be presented in a webinar with the participation of representatives of the involved actors and IMY.