Organizing labels to classify insects found on farms (or on food); scanning a package to detect whether there’s a gun inside the box; calculating the best way to deliver medical treatment to astronauts in space.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming governments.”
Those are just a few of the more than 400 systems, across 42 departments, where the Government of Canada is either exploring or currently using AI in its operations, according to a new public registry released on Friday.
The registry can be viewed on Canada’s Open Government website. It includes searchable categories such as the name of the government department using the system, what each AI system is being used for, and which vendor developed the program. The registry only includes notable AI projects, and not uses the government has deemed “low-risk” such as spell-check or virtual assistants.
In the case of the system being used to scan packages for guns, the registry shows that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is currently testing a tool from Israeli software screening company SeeTrue.
The government says the registry was released as an early-stage version, with only basic search features, as part of a commitment made under Canada’s federal AI strategy to give a more transparent view of AI activity across the federal service. The government says it will be updated and developed to include more detail and features in future iterations based on public feedback next year.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming governments, and we are committed to providing Canadians with information about how it is being used to support programs and services. The AI Register is an important step in building public trust and ensuring the responsible use of AI across the federal public service,” Treasury Board president Shafqat Ali said in an emailed press release on Friday.
Arvind Gupta, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto and a member of Ottawa’s AI Strategy Task Force, said in an email to BetaKit that, at first glance, many of the items on the registry appear to be tools built in-house and for fairly straight-forward uses, but without knowing more about the architecture, training sets, and testing, it’s hard to tell if AI best practices are being followed.
He also hopes to see more Canadian small and medium-sized businesses named on the list in the future. US companies Microsoft and OpenAI are mentioned in the document 75 and 15 times, respectively.
“When I first heard about this list I was hoping it was the start of a new government procurement strategy,” Gupta said. Gupta pointed to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) model in the US, which requires each department to set aside 2 percent of it discretionary budget to procure novel solutions from small or medium-sized enterprises. (The US model is currently on hold pending Congressional funding.)
“Given how much [Canada] spends on [Scientific Research and Experimental Development] … we could redirect some of those funds towards a major and impactful SBIR-inspired program and encourage SMEs to look at selling to the government. Maybe the AI list is really the start of this kind of thinking and maybe not,” Gupta said.
AI has been used by the Canadian government since 1994, according to the government press release. The registry shows that the first use, which is still underway, was by the CBSA for a “fuzzy search” software tool that flags high-risk travellers by searching names across CBSA systems.
In a circular note, the registry website itself mentions that it was created using machine translation, but the outputs were reviewed by human experts.
Image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Nick Linnen.