Impact

Artificial intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We promote AI that benefits society and industry and helps solve the real-life problems of real people.

Scientific impact

The biggest scientific added value of FCAI research stems from the novel AI solutions that can be applied across a variety of different fields. We maximize the positive impact of AI by working together with top experts in an increasing number of scientific disciplines, business domains, and societal initiatives. The resulting new insights leverage and inspire new AI methods.

FCAI aims for three kinds of scientific results:

1) Within AI research, the next generation of solutions, which are able to both learn from data and to plan and simulate, will open doors to the development of AI with new capabilities. 

2) Our Research Programs are solving fundamental technical problems—enabling new kinds of solutions in machine learning and modelling.

3) AI is badly needed in many scientific fields, but the shortcomings of current AI systems are bottlenecks to AI being widely adopted. The new AI is therefore expected to have a massive scientific impact across fields illustrated by our five ambitious Highlight Programs.

Economic impact

FCAI will play a key role in Finland’s AI Strategy to realize the potential for AI-led economic growth by enabling and supporting industrial and societal renewal. By successfully applying AI, Finland can reach a €20-billion and 8% annual boost in GDP by the year 2023. With focused AI-based activities in business, net employment can increase by up to 5%.

Our research results – real AI that is data efficient, trustworthy, and understandable – accelerate the renewal of existing businesses and generate new AI-driven ones. We will also put results into practical use in the public sector.

FCAI forms an ecosystem that enables strong international academic networking with private and public sectors and creates new possibilities for collaboration and synergy, technology transfer, recruitment, and knowledge exchange.

Societal impact

FCAI’s research seeks to create significant positive impacts on humanity. Ethics, fairness, accessibility, transparency, as well as security and privacy are directly integrated into the technical goals of our research. We hold that access to AI must not be restricted to a small group of experts. Decisions made or supported by AI must be transparent and accountable, as well as fair and non-discriminatory.

Solutions to these grand challenges form a large portion of FCAI’s research agenda, including the Research Program AI in society which is designed to explore the social and ethical dimensions of AI, including both the preconditions of trustworthy and socially acceptable AI and the consequences of AI use.

FCAI is structured to facilitate the wide dissemination of research results into society—ranging from industries to the public sector to individual citizens—across diverse fields of application. We are actively participating in strategy work, policy discussions and in advisory bodies to facilitate the ethically sustainable integration of AI into society.

To promote societally conscious applications of AI, FCAI has also founded the FCAI Society, a multi-disciplinary working group to consider the socio-ethical and cultural impact AI will bring.