Project name: VALAWAI
EU Contribution: € 3 926 432
Location: Spain
VALAWAI is an EIC-funded project developing AI systems that understand and respect human values, making AI more useful and trustworthy. It applies this to social media, social robots, and social decision-making /medical protocols, helping to protect individuals from AI's negative effects (harmful content, biased algorithms) while supporting ethical, transparent, and value-aligned decisions, benefiting both society and individual users.
Vision & ImpactVALAWAI envisions trustworthy AI that understands, follows, and explains its behaviour in terms of human values. Our mission: build the scientific foundations and an open toolbox, drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and AI, that lets developers embed ethics into their applications.
CollaborationVALAWAI is part of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge Awareness Inside. The collaboration with this interdisciplinary portfolio has driven joint activities: a special session at ICAART 2024, an art-science gathering at the Venice Biennale, and portfolio-wide workshops at major conferences.
What's next ?As VALAWAI nears its final phase, focus shifts to consolidating its open-source toolbox, validating value-aware AI in real-world settings, and growing the community working on value engineering, ensuring lasting impact beyond the project's funded lifetime.
The EIC's support has enabled a genuinely interdisciplinary team, spanning AI, neuroscience, philosophy, and robotics, to tackle one of the most urgent challenges in technology today: ensuring that AI systems act in alignment with human values. Without this funding, work of this ambition and scope simply would not have been possible.