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ADM+S researchers awarded ARC Linkage Grant
Author Loren Dela Cruz
Date 13 April 2022
Prof Kimberlee Weatherall and Dr Damian Clifford have been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant, as part of a team led by Prof Seth Lazar from ANU’s Humanising Machine Intelligence group, and including Dr Jenny Davis, Dr Tiberio Caetano and Mr Christopher Dolman.
The three-year Linkage Project, Socially Responsible Insurance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, aims to discover the social costs and benefits of using Artificial Intelligence in insurance, and to design practical interventions—responsible design workshops, practical guidance, regulatory proposals, new algorithmic tools—that realise the benefits while mitigating the costs. The project will unite world-leading researchers from philosophy, law, and sociology with industry-leading practitioners from Australia’s largest general insurer, IAG, and the Gradient Institute, Australia’s foremost independent ethical machine learning research and practice group.
Working with partners Gradient Institute and insurance group IAG, the project aims to develop novel ethical AI-based approaches to product design, pricing and claims administration. This should benefit insurers and consumers, realising efficiency gains made possible by AI without unacceptable costs to privacy, fairness, and the unaccountable exercise of power.
ADM+S Chief Investigator Prof Weatherall said, “One of the things that artificial intelligence does is make predictions using massive data inputs beyond the capacity of human beings, and it is already starting to profoundly reshape the insurance industry. In that transformation, it’s critical that we don’t sacrifice the important social functions that insurance serves, or harm or marginalise the people who really need insurance to manage the inevitable risks we all encounter across our lives.”
The ARC Linkage Projects scheme supports academics to work with government and industry partners to tackle complex problems and fast-track solutions to benefit end-users. Visit the ARC website for more information on the program.
