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ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 Structure

Much of the work is concentrated on issues around “Ethical & Societal Concerns” which are being discussed within Working Group 3 "Trustworthiness" of which Ireland holds the Convenorship and Secretariat.

Topics being considered in WG3 are: 

  • Ethical & Societal Concerns – Guidance as to best practice relating to transparency, predictability and control of AI systems, especially for high risk use contexts. This Technical Report also takes into account ISO 26000 "Guidelines for Social Responsibility". 
  • Bias in relation to AI-aided decision making. Measurement techniques and methods for assessing bias.  Bias related vulnerabilities, and mitigation thereof.  
  • Risk management - guidelines on managing risk faced by organizations during the development and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and systems, to assist organizations in integrating risk management for AI into significant activities and functions. This International Standard also takes into account ISO 31000 (Risk management). 
  • Functional Safety of AI systems - to identify the properties, risk factors, available methods, and potential constraints to enable the developer of safety-critical systems to appropriately apply AI technologies to their systems. 
  • Robustness of Neural Networks - Guidance and methodology to assess fundamental properties (such as controlled behaviour and stability) related to the notion of robustness of any neural networks through the use of formal methods. 
  • Explainability of ML models and AI systems - approaches and methods that can be used to achieve explainability objectives of different stakeholders with regards to ML models and AI systems behaviours, outputs, and results. 
  • Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation outlines a quality model for AI systems and is an application-specific extension to the SQuaRE series.

Other Working Groups are focusing on areas such as: 

  • Concepts and terminology - this group establishes terminology for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and describes concepts in the field of AI. 
  • Foundational standards - this group is developing AI concepts and terminology and a framework for AI systems using machine learning. 
  • Big Data – the big data programme now comes under SC 42 and has projects for the overview and vocabulary, data quality measures and management and a big data reference architecture (BDRA). 
  • Use Cases and Guidelines for Applications - looking at different vertical application areas. 

Project Number

Project Title
ISO/IEC 5469 Functional safety and AI systems 
ISO/IEC TS 6254 Objectives and methods for explainability of ML models and AI systems 
ISO/IEC TR 24368 Overview of ethical and societal concerns 
ISO/IEC TR 24027 Bias in AI systems and AI aided decision making
ISO/IEC TR 24028 Overview of trustworthiness in AI 
ISO/IEC TR 24029-1 Assessment of the robustness of neural networks — 1 
ISO/IEC TR 24029-2 Assessment of the robustness of neural networks — 2 
ISO/IEC TR 24368 Overview of ethical and societal concerns 
ISO/IEC 25059 Software engineering - Systems and software Quality Requirements 

Links to other AI forums