Making trustworthy AI a competitive lever for Airbus
Meriem GHRIB, Data Scientist & AI Engineer, Airbus
“The Confiance.ai program has provided Airbus with a complete chain combining methodology and technical tools for integrating trusted AI into our products. Through its contribution to the program, Airbus has been able to remove certain scientific, technological and regulatory obstacles to the application of trusted AI in critical systems. The end-to-end approach through industrial use cases such as “LARD – Landing Approach Runway Detection” was the strength of this program.”
Confiance.ai has enabled Airbus to develop methodologies and tools for integrating trustworthy AI into its critical systems, while strengthening the expertise of its teams and collaborating with partners. This program has helped to remove technological and regulatory hurdles, notably through concrete use cases such as runway detection, and plays a key role in Airbus’ strategy for compliant and competitive AI.
AI adoption issues specific to Airbus
The introduction of AI into Airbus products, services and working methods raises several challenges. The main challenge concerns on-board AI and the optimal, safe use of available hardware resources, so as to rapidly embed a large number of algorithms on aircraft.
Products and services affected by the Confiance.ai program
Products impacted by the trust results include image object detection, semantic segmentation, monitoring and synthetic data generation functions.
Confiance.ai’s contribution to Airbus’s strategy and challenges
The Confiance.ai program has enabled Airbus to collaborate with other partners, and to assess where development efforts should be focused, particularly in view of the rapid evolution of technology bricks and the issue of on-board AI.
Competitive advantages developed with Confiance.ai
Participation in the Confiance.ai program has enabled Airbus to enhance the skills of its teams, create tool-based methods for the development of trustworthy AI, and benefit from a dynamic partnership between industry and academia. This has given us a huge competitive advantage over non-participating players.
Challenges and conditions for success for the next phase of the Confiance.ai program
For Airbus, it is important to continue the program in order to maintain the industrial and academic momentum on the subject of trustworthy AI, benefiting from a significant leverage effect. While the first release of the program has lifted a number of hurdles, there are still many others that need to be addressed.
Example of current or future implementation/deployment
Airbus was able to deploy the Confiance.ai methodology from start to finish on the Landing Approach Runway Detection (LARD) use case. Several technological bricks, such as online monitoring, anomaly detection, uncertainty quantification based on compliant prediction and explicability, were investigated through this use case.
Accelerating AI Act compliance with the Confiance.ai program
Confiance.ai has enabled Airbus to increase its expertise, master the scientific state of the art, develop methods and tools, modify and/or define internal processes, and benefit from interactions with AI regulatory authorities.