According to the head of the centre Dr Meelis Kull, the mission of EXAI is to create methods for developing trustworthy artificial intelligence systems and to ensure that they serve the interests of society in the best possible way. Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving and there is enormous unused potential. In order to Estonian digital nation’s success story to continue, we need to deploy artificial intelligence wherever practical. To achieve that, it is necessary to complement large language models with knowledge about the Estonian language, culture and state. It is also necessary to find ways to integrate artificial intelligence with existing digital solutions while ensuring reliability, safety, privacy and security. Basic and applied research at the centre of excellence and collaboration with government and enterprises will help achieve this.

The role of the ECePS team in the EXAI project is to test the use of large language models (LLMs) in public sector services. Currently, we are conducting a pilot study with the Estonian Unemployment Fund to leverage the language model to evaluate service quality and enhance efficiency in similar settings. Another objective of our work is to contribute to a model for generating synthetic data. This involves generating synthetic copies of real data in a way that does not infringe privacy, enabling models and future e-services to be tested faster using synthetic data that is similar to and compliant with real data, while also complying with all ethics rules and regulations.

In the second stage of the project, this knowledge will be transformed into high-quality academic content and published in leading journals. Awareness will also be raised among the general public via popular science outlets and the media.

Professor Vincent Homburg, Dr Mihkel Solvak, Dr Helen Eenmaa, Art Alishani and Bogdan Romanov are the team members participating in this endeavour. 

Over the next seven years, the government will fund ten centres of excellence addressing scientific issues of importance to Estonia. The University of Tartu leads six of them - green hydrogen and energy technologies, artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, population and culture, well-being sciences and sustainable land use -, and participates as a partner in all others. Centres of excellence bring together high-level research teams from different research fields and institutions to achieve high-level international research results, considering the needs of Estonian society and economy.