ALCHIMIA Project’s Ex-Post Human-Centric Research and the ALTAI Assessment
By Rachel Hale, Dean Stroud, Martin Weinel and Vinicio Di Iorio
Our social science research team is entering the final phase of its work. Building on early findings from the ex-ante stage, the current ex-post research focuses on how ALCHIMIA’s technologies are experienced by the people using them. Surveys and interviews are under preparation across four pilot sites in Italy, France, Spain, and Poland. The goal is to understand how ALCHIMIA is influencing production processes and decision-making on the ground.
The ALCHIMIA Project social science team’s ex-post empirical research will:
- continue to reflexively analyze and evaluate the alignment of the design and development activities in the ALCHIMIA project with six human-centered design principles
- validate, evaluate and demonstrate how the measures tackling human and social aspects enhance the impact of the overall project
- evaluate, post-insertion, and compare to the data collected in the ex-ante phase, whether the data points to an acceptance and appreciation of the technology introduced, or some resistance to it
- gather feedback on the developed training products
In parallel, the team is coordinating with the consortium on the final ALTAI (EU Assessment List for Trustworthy AI) evaluation. This ensures that the ALCHIMIA platform aligns with the EU’s guidelines for ethical and trustworthy AI – right through to the project’s completion in November 2025. ALTAI requires eight elements to be assessed and so far, the ALCHIMIA solution is showing good alignment with all of these elements:
- Fundamental Rights
- Human Agency and Oversight
- Technical Robustness and Safety
- Privacy and Data Governance
- Transparency
- Diversity, Non-discrimination and Fairness
- Societal and Environmental Well-being
- Accountability
