Responsible Innovation in South America- from Nottingham to Colombia

Dr Virginia Portillo, Research Fellow at Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute and Coordinator of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for Responsible AI UK (RAi UK) was invited by the Industrial University of Santander (UIS), in Bucaramanga, Colombia as keynote speaker to their annual Academic Conference U24 fest. The conference ran from the 28^{th of} October through to the 1^st of November and was organised by Professors Ana Cecilia Ojeda Avellaneda, Sandra García Vergara and Johan Petit Suárez. We are very grateful to them and their team for the warm welcome to UIS and interest in our research.

Views from the Industrial University of Santander (UIS), Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia (taken by Dr Virginia Portillo).

This year U24 fest ‘Ideas to protect life’ was a multidisciplinary event aimed to generate academic and social impact, creating opportunities for sharing ideas and expectations for caring and improving life in all its forms; and to encourage a collective culture to take action for a better life and society for everyone. With these topics also embedded in the core values of Responsible Innovation (RI), we focused on sharing our RI expertise and research findings, delivering a presentation, taking part in a discussion panel and running a workshop for academics and innovators, highlighting our research outputs, tools and methods introduced to support RI practice within the academic, education and industrial sectors.

Our presentation: “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) – Why, What for and How?” and follow up panel discussion, attracted over 500 students and academics from several disciplines, including UIS’s Faculties of Engineering, Human Sciences, Science and Health. Dr Portillo shared data based on her latest research in the field of RI as part of Horizon Digital Economy Research and Trustworthy Autonomy Systems (TAS) Programmes – both funded by UKRI (Portillo et al, 2023, 2024; Stahl et al., 2024). Participants contributed to an interesting discussion around the challenges of stakeholder engagement and ways of evidencing societal impact. We highlighted that to cultivate and maintain a RRI practice that drives socially desirable, ethically acceptable and sustainable products and processes, working as part of a multidisciplinary team is key. As is  to be humble and critical about our knowledge and limitations and to be open to people’s expertise and opinions. This is a collective endeavour and needs support and resources to interpret, implement and sustain RI practice throughout and across related activities. We found that RI support is crucial at an intermediate level of RI implementation (meso-level) between projects and organisations (Stahl et al., 2024).

The panel discussion on “Research and Innovation” was moderated by Prof. Laura Rodriguez Villamizar – Director of Research and Extension, School of Medicine, UIS and the panellist were: Vanessa Quiroga Arciniegas, Director of Knowledge Exchange, UIS, Director Dr Rafael Angarita, School of Philosophy, UIS and Dr Virginia Portillo (UoN). The topics included: the connection between research and innovation within each panellist’s area of expertise, the challenges of responsible research and innovation, who the stakeholders are and how best to engage and include different voices and thoughts in the debate surrounding RI. The discussion also addressed what meaningful transparency means when we refer to RI within science and technology, the ethical and societal impact of the deployment of AI systems considering the clash with societal values, the lack of global AI regulation, the complexity of the AI international governance landscape and the commercial interests of big tech companies.

Our workshop: “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into practice” was a productive session during which we shared our vision, principles of RRI, and a novel tool we developed as part of our research to help articulate RRI in practice: Responsible Innovation Prompts and Practice Cards (RI Cards), Portillo et al, 2023. We ran a hands-on activity using physical decks of our RI Cards to drive discussion on RI practice, based on a project led by Prof Clara Lopez Gualdron who participated in the workshop (see pictures below). Using a real case scenario sparked fruitful discussion and helped the project team anticipate, reflect, identify stakeholders, and in addition, highlighted some key elements to consider when making their RI action plan.

This was an amazing opportunity for Knowledge Exchange on RI and RRI between UIS and The University of Nottingham, as kindly expressed by Vanessa Quiroga, Director for Knowledge Exchange (KE), UIS.

All activities ignited open, reflective discussions, highlighting that beyond jurisdictions, different resources and needs between the Global North and the Global South, we all face imminent challenges regarding RRI and RI within the academic and industrial sector. Considering the exponential advances of novel digital technologies and artificial intelligence, we agreed that embedded responsible practice is key to ensure the designed, deployment, governance (and decommission) of responsible and sustainable innovative processes and products, in way that benefits society as a whole, and in both world hemispheres.

We look forward to further developing and strengthening this link between both institutions and continuing to learn for each other’s work experiences while fostering opportunities for knowledge exchange. This will contribute to bridging the gaps on RRI and RI between the Global North and the Global South.

Dr Virginia Portillo would like to thank UIS for their support to finance her trip to attend U24 fest and UKRI (EP/T022493/1 Horizon Digital Economy Research and EP/V00784X/1 Trustworthy Autonomous Systems).

PAPERS:

Portillo, V., Greenhalgh, C., Craigon, P.J., and Ten Holter, C. 2023. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Prompts and Practice Cards: a Tool to Support Responsible Practice. In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 57, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3599721

Portillo, V.,Webb, H., Craigon, P.J., Wilton, R., Dowthwaite, L. and Luwemba E. 2024. Responsibility Statement on research project outputs- to who and what for? In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 30, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686038.3686651

Stahl, B. C., Portillo, V., Wagner, H., Craigon, P. J., Darzentas, D., De Ossorno Garcia, S., … Webb, H. (2024). Implementing responsible innovation: the role of the meso-level(s) between project and organisation. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2024.2370934

Story credits: Virginia Portillo & Hazel Sayers