Since May 2022, Airbus Protect and the EASA have been working with a consortium composed of LNE and Numalis on the MLEAP (Machine Learning application approval) project.
What is the MLEAP Project?
This two-year research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme aims to identify concrete means of compliance for EASA Artificial Intelligence concept paper. It focuses on three main technical challenges for AI certification: data completeness and representativeness Generalization guarantees, Robustness and Stability.
In February 2020, EASA published its Artificial Intelligence Roadmap followed by a first deliverable, EASA AI Concept Paper ‘First usable guidance for level 1 machine learning applications’ in December 2021. This concept paper lays the foundation for future EASA guidance for the approval of ML applications and identifies a number of areas in which further research is necessary to identify efficient and practicable means of compliance to address some of the defined ‘AI trustworthiness’ objectives. MLEAP timeframe is established to support key EASA AI programme milestones as depicted in figure below:
What happened during the first MLEAP Stakeholders Day?
On Thursday 23 November 2022, the first dissemination event of the MLEAP project, was held at EASA Facilities in Cologne, Germany.
The aim of this “Stakeholders Day 2022” was to present in detail the objectives of the project to the various parties (aircraft and ATM/ANS system designers, aircraft manufacturers, certification specialists, authorities, standardisation bodies..) directly interested in the results of this research project.
During this event, members of the consortium gathered and met for the first time physically and had the opportunity to exchange and meet.
Around 60 attendees with different backgrounds attended this hybrid event. The EASA AI team presented to the audience its vision, and how the MLEAP project will deliver on the AI roadmap, before the MLEAP consortium presented the project work plan, the objectives of each technical task and the first results achieved. Stakeholders’ reactions and questions were collected in a Q&A session and will serve as an input in future phases of the project.
The members of the consortium were happy about the outcome of this day.
All meeting material is available on MLEAP project page:
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/research-projects/machine-learning-application-approval
What’s next for the MLEAP project?
The next MLEAP public event is set for May 17th 2023 and will take place at EASA headquarters in Cologne, Germany. This is a great opportunity to meet, present and answer questions of interested parties on the first public deliverables of the MLEAP project to be published in May 2023.
More information on this event will be published soon on our website and on the EASA.