New projects and liaisons for artificial intelligence (AI) were announced recently at the biannual plenary for the joint IEC and ISO committee on AI, SC 42.

The event in Vienna, Austria, brought together more than 250 world experts from 60 countries. Progress was also made on a number of key international standards including the soon-to-be-published ISO/IEC 42001, which will be the world's first certifiable management system standard for AI.

Future regulations related to AI, such as the upcoming European Union AI Act, were also discussed in the context of how international standards can be key tools to support compliance.

New areas of work were announced and progress was made in a number of key areas:

• two new joint working groups established: JWG4 with IEC TC 65/SC 65A, on functional safety in AI systems and JWG 5 with ISO TC 37 on natural language processing systems
• new study areas agreed upon, including operational design domain (ODD), human-machine teaming, evaluation metrics for AI use cases and applications, guidance on model training efficiency optimization of machine learning system, guidance for generative AI applications, AI maturity model and more
• amendments to the foundational AI terminology and framework standards (ISO/IEC 22989 and ISO/IEC 23053) to add generative AI concepts
• approved the creation of a handbook aimed at assisting SME organizations looking to use the highly anticipated ISO/IEC 42001 international standard, which will be the world's first certifiable management system standard for AI when it is published.

Wael William Diab, Chair of the joint IEC and ISO committee on AI said: "The expansion of our programme of work reflects the importance of international standards as part of the solution set to enable responsible adoption.

"In addition, the continual increase of joint collaboration with sister IEC and ISO committees is reflective of the ever growing opportunities for AI to benefit society across applications domains".

SC 42's working groups also undertook their annual strategic planning and road-mapping exercise to look at emerging areas for AI standardization.

SC 42 develops international standards for artificial intelligence. Its unique holistic approach considers the entire AI ecosystem, by looking at technology capability and non-technical requirements, such as business, regulatory and policy requirements, application domain needs, and ethical and societal concerns.

The committee organizes regular workshops on AI to discuss emerging trends, technology, requirements and applications as well as the role of standards. They bring together innovators at the frontier of AI development from diverse locations, sectors and backgrounds involved in research, deployment, standardization, startups, applications and oversight.

The fourth bi-annual ISO/IEC AI Workshop will be held in December and will cover four content tracks: AI applications, beneficial AI, novel AI standardization approaches and emerging AI technology trends and requirements.

(Source: IEC)