2 year FRGS Grant Awarded to Research Team Including SLC Partner

On the back of the MCMC grant awarded earlier this year, a 2nd national level grant has been awarded to a research team including Darmain Segaran, the technology partner of Segaran Law Chambers. This two-year research grant titled "Aligning a national AI ethics framework with Malaysian values to govern the development and deployment of trustworthy and responsible AI systems in Malaysia” is under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) which is a research grant from the Ministry of Education (MOE).

This research aims to draft a Malaysian National AI Ethics Framework (NAIEF) for AI governance founded on universally accepted values that also align with national values. It will employ a comprehensive qualitative investigation of values in existing international ethics frameworks, semi-structured interviews to aid the determination of national values through thematic analysis, and the application of ethical design thinking in the ethical design of the self-assessment guide. A survey will measure the organisational attitudes of developers and deployers of AI systems towards AI governance, and its results will be analysed using descriptive statistics.

This will achieve the research objectives of identifying and extracting core principles and national values found in existing international AI ethics frameworks and the Rukun Negara and the Federal Constitution, respectively, to identify which values impact the evaluation of AI systems, and positing both a NAIEF that aligns with national and universal values, and a self-assessment guide for internal governance to operationalise the framework. The knowledge generated will underpin the construction of a NAIEF to offer best practice guidance on AI governance to create a trusted ecosystem within its digital economy in line with national policies.

Contact SLC at contact@segaranlaw.com for more information on this project or queries on data protection, AI ethics and other related technology law services.