The strategic vision for artificial intelligence (AI) in Luxembourg, presented in 2019 by former Prime Minister and Minister for Digitalisation Xavier Bettel, aims to position the country as one of the most advanced digital societies in Europe and the world. The aim is to create a sustainable economy based on data and to develop AI centred on the needs of citizens.
According to the European Parliament, AI is defined as the ability of a machine to reproduce human behaviour such as reasoning, planning and creativity, as well as to perceive its environment, solve problems and take action to achieve a specific goal. This technology is based on the use of data, algorithms and computing power.
The European Commission stresses that advances in computing and the growing availability of data are essential for the development of AI. Luxembourg, with its technological and industrial assets and high-quality digital infrastructure, is well positioned to take advantage of the benefits of AI and put them at the service of society as a whole.
The strategic vision of AI in Luxembourg has led to the creation of the AI4Gov inter-ministerial committee, bringing together representatives from the Ministry of Digitalisation, the Media and Communications Service (SMC) and the Information and Press Service (SIP). This committee aims to encourage ministries and administrations to use AI and data science to transform their operations and businesses. Its aim is to promote the adoption of these innovative technologies to solve existing challenges, improve the efficiency of data processing and optimise administrative services and procedures.
In addition, the AI4Gov initiative aims to provide government officials with practical experience in acquiring and using advanced AI technologies. The ultimate aim is to develop in-house expertise and position the Public Administration as a driver of innovation.
The AI4Gov committee has launched calls for projects to encourage the use of AI in the Luxembourg Public Administration. These calls attracted a significant number of proposals, demonstrating the growing interest in these technologies. The selected projects benefited from technical and legal support to develop functional prototypes that can be used by civil servants or the general public.
The selected projects include :
- Indexing government photos: Using AI to identify political figures in photos and generate enhanced metadata.
- Extraction of topographical objects: Using AI to extract topographical objects from aerial images in order to facilitate the updating of the Administration du cadastre et de la topographie’s databases.
- Text transcription: Improved transcription of article texts using OCR for automatic identification of named entities in the National Library’s digitised archives.
- Automatic recognition of ancient handwriting: Submission of digitised images of manuscripts to an AI-assisted handwriting recognition platform to make these sources legible and understandable.
- Recruitment procedures: Using AI to improve recruitment procedures in the Luxembourg civil service.
- Detection of outlier data: Implementation of automated monitoring to detect outliers in financial data for the municipal sector.
- Automatic document labelling: Automatic document labelling to link a chatbot with the knowledge graph of Luxembourg legislation.
- Statistics: Implementation of a data science programme to produce statistics on the mobile telephony database.
- ADEM Interact: Development of a conversational artificial intelligence platform to assist ADEM agents in their interactions with jobseekers.
- ADEM Profiling: Using analysis of existing data at ADEM to develop a support model to assess jobseekers’ needs.
- Anomaly detection: Using machine learning to detect water leaks in the water distribution network.
The AI4Gov committee is deploying several initiatives to support AI projects in the public sector:
- Legal & Ethics Working Group: In early 2020, the committee set up an interdepartmental AI Legal & Ethics Working Group to provide legal and ethical support for AI projects. This group assesses the legal and ethical risks of AI4Gov projects and establishes a risk-based governance approach.
- Raising awareness among public officials: The committee leads a community of public officials interested in AI and data science, by distributing newsletters and organising webinars to present the activities of the AI4Gov initiative and increase knowledge about AI.
- GovCloud GPU service: In 2020, the committee identified and pooled the computing resource needs of state entities for AI projects. A common infrastructure of specialised machines with GPU processors has been set up within the CTIE to meet these needs.