KONICA MINOLTA GROUP PUBLISHES ITS POLICY FOR THE USE OF AI

Almost every sector of the economy and society has been affected by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or will be soon.

However, AI is rich in contradictions: there are powerful tools that are also surprisingly limited in terms of current capabilities. AI can improve human existence, as well as threatens to deepen social divides and poses risks to people privacy and autonomy. Algorithms are expected to be data-driven and impartial, but it has been demonstrated how models can be greatly biased due to the kind of data used to train them.

That’s why Konica Minolta published its policy for the use of Artificial Intelligence, to share an understanding of the appropriate use of AI throughout the group and unite all its members in actively using AI to contribute to creating a better, human-centric society, to fulfil its responsibility as a global company.

As shown in the infographic, the main objective of the AI policy is to make sure that the development of AI activities in the company will aim at:

• realizing a society where people can pursue motivation and satisfaction in life,
• ensuring safety and security,
• respecting fairness,
• pursuing transparency and accountability,
• working with stakeholders, creating the way for appropriate use of AI
• fostering human resources.

AI IS UBIQUITOUS WITH REVENUES EXPECTED TO THRIVE

Even if AI is ubiquitous, as reminded by MIT’s professor Tomaso Poggio in his interview for our blog, “people expecting to have a really intelligent machine in less than ten years are going to be deluded”.

Nonetheless, for specific contexts, revenues from the global AI market are expected to grow. For instance, according to Tractica, ‘static image recognition, classification and tagging’ is forecast to be the most lucrative sector for AI with expected cumulative revenue of just over 8 billion U.S. dollars, followed by ‘algorithmic trading strategy’ and ‘processing of patient data’.

ENGAGING PEOPLE TO MAKE BETTER AI

It is therefore important, to engage people and experts from different contexts to drive this technology towards safe and secure applications that support the creation of a sustainable society.

Considering the increasing market and the variety of opportunities, it is no surprise most of the companies have published AI and data principles. One of the first and most famous is the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence, whose founding members Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM announced it five years ago and kept the initiative focused on researching for best practices of artificial intelligence systems and educating the public about AI.

Also from the regulatory perspective, and considering that 90% of organizations had some ethical issues related to AI development, both the European Commission and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued Artificial Intelligence guidelines. The common ethical principles to be used for designing AI applications focus on truth, fairness and equity. All aspects that put at the first place humans and their realisation, similarly to what has been presented in Konica Minolta.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL SERVICES R&D AND AI

Within our research units, distributed across Japan, the US and Europe, we’re exploiting AI for developing some of our digital services. For instance for the HitomeQ care Support service for care facilities, where a sensor mounted on the ceiling detects critical events within a room, or for the Video Solution Services related to Box Defect Detection and Suspicious Behaviour Detection.

Get in contact with our researchers, if you would like to know more about the way we use Artificial Intelligence for developing our solutions.

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash.