It is important and timely to identify areas where the mathematical sciences can contribute to underpinning ethical-by-design AI, support existing work in AI safety and security, and provide principled reasoning and quantification about the behaviour and interactions of existing systems. Conversely, reasoning and quantification are pre-eminently the domain of mathematics.

Furthermore, I believe that these challenges can and should be elicited by bringing the mathematical sciences community in the UK together with AI developers and practioners and with those working in ethics and regulation. Such activity would benefit the development and application of AI and provide the mathematical sciences with a welcome fresh perspective on problems and theory.

I am proposing a purely informal network of people interested in bringing the right people together to take forward the process of using some plausible ethical requirement to develop mathematical research questions likely to be attractive to researchers and funders – not to carry out the work so much as to identify how and where it should be done.  This site is currently that network.

I envisage a workshop based on this network to identify mathematical challenges arising from ethical constraints on AI systems and specific opportunities for further research and development. it would institutional collaboration on practical matters.

It would aim to identify

• questions requiring deep mathematical research

• opportunities to develop existing research outputs into techniques that can be disseminated to practitioners and policy-makers

• opportunities to develop known techniques into software or business tools

• ways to improve connectivity and mutual understanding between researchers, developers, practitioners and policy-makers