The Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security addresses the trustworthiness of intelligent systems in safety-critical applications. A unique, human-centered research approach covers the entire interdisciplinary research of trustworthy data analytics, explainable machine learning, and privacy-aware algorithms.

Trust in the age of the digital society

The level of digitalization is constantly increasing in many areas of our lives. Accompanying this are major scientific challenges for artificial intelligence, machine learning and cybersecurity: establishing trust and formally guaranteeing it. The Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security addresses this challenge at the crossroads between the development of digital technology and societal acceptance. Our goal is to develop trustworthy technology and to enable humans to understand this technology.
 

Human-centered research approach

The interdisciplinary research focuses on long-term research questions that we can only in an interdisciplinary manner: How can people gain a better understanding of intelligent systems? How can we implement provable trust and security guarantees into machine learning? How shall we balance privacy and functionality?
 
To answer these and other open research questions we engage in joint research efforts between social sciences, data sciences, and IT security. Thereby, the human as a decision maker in industry, academia and politics is at the heart of our ongoing and future research. These decision-makers must be enabled to gain trust in intelligent systems, and to understand and regulate them.

Professor Emmanuel Müller, Director:

“In the digital age, many decisions made by people in the spheres of science, industry and society are supported by modern computer-based technologies – sometimes even though we’re not aware of them or in blind trust. At the same time, there’s a lack of trust in digital technologies such as artificial intelligence in many areas of society.

The vision of the interdisciplinary Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security is to close this trust gap through novel scientific approaches. We wish to develop trustworthy methods that reconcile technological reliability and human trust according to our mission statement ‘Trustworthy by Design’.
We pursue a unique interdisciplinary research approach that covers the full spectrum of scientific challenges of trustworthy and privacy-conscious technologies. It is only by coupling a wide range of technological and non-technological disciplines – from mathematics, statistics and computer science to psychology, humanities and social sciences – that we can deliver the desired human-centric focus and trustworthiness of statistical data analysis, machine learning and cybersecurity, thus helping to increase society’s acceptance of trustworthy technologies. To this end, we are leveraging the strengths of our three universities in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, statistics and psychology.”