Digiotouch Showcases BIAS Project's Trustworthy AI Solutions at Latitude59

Latitude59 is the flagship startup and tech event of Estonia, the world’s first digital society. As an Estonian startup, Digiotouch has been participating since 2019. This year, it brought together over 3,000 visitors, including 500+ investors and 800+ vetted startups, from 60 countries and featured more than 30 official side events. This provided the perfect momentum to showcase the EU-funded Horizon Europe BIAS project. 

The BIAS project and its partners are responsible for setting a gold standard for AI used in the labour market, ensuring it is trustworthy and socially responsible. In this roadmap, Digiotouch has created an Estonian National Lab, a community of practitioners, employees, HR managers, researchers, and AI specialists with a special focus on underrepresented communities. They participate in needs analysis and voice their perspectives through surveys, interviews, and co-creation workshops. Nataliia Kinash, Digiotouch’s Data Scientist, engaged with Latitude59 participants, discussing the importance of the National Lab, forms of future engagement, and an upcoming summer school to be hosted in Tallinn during the first week of April 2025. 

Digiotouch also leveraged the powerful and impactful platform to advance the BIAS project’s mission of bridging the vital gap between trustworthy AI and recruitment processes. Soumya Kanti Datta, Digiotouch’s CEO, and Nataliia highlighted the development and deployment of BIAS’ innovative tool, Debiaser, designed to enhance HR practices through trustworthy AI integration to Latitude59 conference attendees. The Debiaser, the proof-of-concept technology of the project, contains software modules that identify and mitigate bias and unfairness in recruitment decision-making. For industry-wide adoption and social impact, Debiaser components will be made available to the AI community with an open-source license. 

The BIAS is also glad to report overwhelmingly positive feedback received from participants on the vision and impact roadmap of the project. Given the rising awareness of algorithmic bias in AI tools used in recruitment, such trustworthy AI-powered solutions are in great demand. The BIAS project researchers are working to solve this puzzle.