U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo has announced that NIST will resume facial age estimation testing to form a public working group that builds on the guidance for AI technology in the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (RMF).
The timely formation of an AI working group follows another key initiative led by the Biden-Harris Administration to manage the risks associated with AI. Biden met with 8 influential tech leaders, convening a balanced debate in San Francisco on the promises and risks of AI.
AI has the potential to grow economies significantly, improve investigative techniques in policing and optimise identity verification with biometrics, however earns a reputation for unnecessarily collecting data and being intrusive to users’ privacy which poses a danger to innovation. In his recent address on AI, Biden forecasted vast technological change in the next 10 years but stressed that organisations need to mitigate the privacy risks.
The framework and now the working group will jointly attempt to regulate AI technologies and issue essential guidance to organisations in their development and testing processes. The statement held organisations at the helm of creating generative AI tech responsible for “ensuring trustworthiness”.
Secretary Gina Raimondo reiterated the government’s balanced approach:
“President Biden has been clear that we must work to harness the enormous potential while managing the risks posed by AI to our economy, national security and society”, she said.
The Networking group has set out short to long-term goals to be achieved in gathering insight on how the AI Risk Management Framework may be used to provision generative AI technologies. In the longer term, the working group will support NIST’s testing function which assesses accuracy rankings between vendor solutions and encourage top use cases of our time, such as in healthcare, policing, and for security challenges.
