Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance Platform

About this Repository 🗂

This repository contains the code and documentation for the Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance (TEA) platform—an application for building trustworthy and ethical assurance cases, developed by researchers at the Alan Turing Institute and University of York.

To use the TEA platform, please go to https://assuranceplatform.azurewebsites.net/.

To view the documentation site, please go to https://alan-turing-institute.github.io/AssurancePlatform.

Quickstart install instructions

To get started quickly with installing this platform visit the backend and frontend installation instructions.

What is Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance? 🤝

Trustworthy and ethical assurance is a methodology and procedure for developing a structured argument, which provides reviewable (and contestable) assurance that a set of claims about a normative goal of a data-driven technology are warranted given the available evidence.

The following elements are central to this methodology and procedure:

• The SAFE-D Principles: a set of five operationalisable principles—Sustainability, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, Data Stewardship—that have been carefully designed and refined to address real-world challenges associated with the design, development, and deployment of data-driven technologies.
• Assurance Cases: the documented argument that communicates the basis for how and why a goal has been achieved.
• Argument Patterns: starting templates for building assurance cases. They identify the types of claims (or, the sets of reasons) that need to be established to justify the associated top-level normative goal.

The Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance platform brings these elements together in a usable and accessible manner, and helps project teams to provide trustworthy and justifiable assurance about the processes they undertook when designing, developing, and deploying their technology or system.

Installation Instructions 💻

The Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance application can be run locally or deployed on your own server or a cloud-based service (e.g. Azure). To view the different installation instructions, please visit our documentation site for the backend and frontend.

Further Resources 📚

The following resources provide additional information about the Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance framework and methodology:

• Burr, C., & Leslie, D. (2022). Ethical assurance: A practical approach to the responsible design, development, and deployment of data-driven technologies. AI and Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00178-0
• Burr, C. and Powell, R., (2022) Trustworthy Assurance of Digital Mental Healthcare. The Alan Turing Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7107200

Funding Statements

Between April 2023 and December 2023 this project received funding from the Assuring Autonomy International Programme, a partnership between Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York, which was awarded to Dr Christopher Burr.

Between July 2021 and June 2022 this project received funding from the UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Hub, which was awarded to Dr Christopher Burr (Grant number: TAS_PP_00040).

Contributors

nbarlowATI 🐛 💻 📖 🎨 💡 🤔 ⚠️	Markus Hauru 🐛 💻 📖 🎨 💡 🤔 ⚠️	Aoife Hughes 🐛 💻 🤔 ⚠️	Flora 🐛 💻 📖 🎨 💡 🤔	Christopher Burr 🐛 💻 📖 🎨 💡 🤔 ⚠️ 👀 📢 📓 🔬 📣 📆	Cassandra Gould van Praag 🤔 👀 📆 💬 🎨	Kalle Westerling 🤔 👀 📆 💬 💻
Sophie Arana 🤔 👀 📆 💬 🎨	Shakir Laher 🖋 📖 🤔 🔬