AI and Robotics (AIR) Solution Validation Platform

For Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics (R) solutions to achieve mass adoption across industries, impartial performance evaluation to establish trustworthiness is fundamental, before the AIR technology field can progress to the governance stage with a set of industry-accepted best practices and enforceable regulatory frameworks. Currently, there is a disconnect between the solution seekers and solution providers of AIR technology due to different foci – solution providers are primarily concerned with the science and capabilities of the technology, while solution seekers are looking at outcomes. The technology is stuck in the bind of requiring regulation but not yet reaching the regulation stage due to the missing link of independent performance evaluation.

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation has become the first in the world to establish an AIR Validation Platform as an independent third-party performance evaluation tool to address this missing link and help build the trustworthiness of AIR solutions. The platform uses a combination of Physical and Virtual labs based on a comprehensive set of consideration factors of relevance to solution seekers and solution providers to establish an objective set of performance metrics and build consensus for them.

A Physical Lab will be equipped with a range of hardware to enable AI and Robotics functional performance and safety testing. It will support solution providers to test and measure the actual performance parameters of a solution such as accuracy, repeatability and mobility. Then those parameters will be used to create a corresponding virtual AIR solution in a Virtual Lab together with different application scenarios provided by solution seekers, such as a hospital, hotel or shopping mall, as a digital twin. Limitless combinations of variables can be added to the Virtual Lab to ascertain a solution’s potential performance in varied settings and application scenarios of any industry.

This paper on the AIR Validation Platform will articulate the challenge of establishing trust for AIR technology and explain in detail the first-in-the-market solution that covers all three critical parts of building trustworthiness – performance metrics, physical testing and virtual testing. The paper will also share initial results from two pilot studies and describe the platform roadmap for building trust, encouraging mass adoption and driving the market dynamics that will lead to global standards for regulation.

Author(s): Crystal LM Fok and Eric KS Cheng

Abstract | Full-Text | PDF

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