NIST launches new AI testing, evaluation, validation and verification program
Named ARIA, the program aims to help organizations and individuals determine whether a given AI technology will be valid, reliable, safe, secure, private, and fair once deployed.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new testing, evaluation, validation and verification program intended to help improve understanding of artificial intelligence’s (AI) capabilities and impacts.
Named ARIA, short for Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI, the program aims to help organizations and individuals determine whether a given AI technology will be valid, reliable, safe, secure, private, and fair once deployed. The program comes shortly after several recent announcements by NIST around the 180-day mark of the Executive Order on Trustworthy AI and the U.S. AI Safety Institute’s unveiling of its strategic vision and international safety network.
“In order to fully understand the impacts AI is having and will have on our society, we need to test how AI functions in realistic scenarios — and that’s exactly what we’re doing with this program,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. “With the ARIA program, and other efforts to support Commerce’s responsibilities under President Biden’s Executive Order on AI, NIST and the U.S. AI Safety Institute are pulling every lever when it comes to mitigating the risks and maximizing the benefits of AI.”
ARIA expands on the AI Risk Management Framework, which NIST released in January 2023, and helps to operationalize the framework’s risk measurement function, which recommends that quantitative and qualitative techniques be used to analyze and monitor AI risk and impacts. ARIA will help assess those risks and impacts by developing a new set of methodologies and metrics for quantifying how well a system maintains safe functionality within societal contexts.
Click here to read the news release.
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