The Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA) recently awarded funding to a multi-year, multidisciplinary research programme on the democratisation of AI: DECIDE. Professor Mieke Boon of the University of Twente’s Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS) is the project’s principal investigator. What exactly does she plan to do? A conversation about citizens, Big Tech and black boxes.

Whether it concerns your mortgage application, a job application, a medical diagnosis, or an assessment of your grandmother’s care needs, institutions and companies increasingly rely on AI-based evaluations when making decisions. The most widely used AI tools are typically controlled by major tech companies, which offer little to no insight into how these systems reach their conclusions. Users have no influence over the outcome, despite being directly affected by it. According to Professor Mieke Boon and her colleagues, that is unacceptable. Their goal: to make AI more transparent and more democratic.

Read the whole interview with Mieke Boon on UToday.