Multimodal Interactions of and Observation of Users in a Controlled Environment (MIAUCE)

Antoinette Rouvroy, National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and Information Technology & Law Research Centre, University of Namur (CRID)

Abstract

The MIAUCE research consortium, funded by the European Commission (2006-2009), gathers European industrial, techno-scientific and human sciences research teams focused on the development of technologies of multimodal observation of persons for security, marketing or entertainment purposes.

Inscribed in the prospective innovation field of “ambient intelligence”, the technological innovations envisioned in the MIAUCE project rely on a variety of networked sensors and ICT terminals embedded in daily environments and allowing the “autonomic” adjustment and adaptation of that environment, the automatic triggering of alerts and safety or security measures, or an individualized and customized provision of services and goods, automatically adapted to fit the user’s profile, his gestures and attitudes, his emotions (as detected through emotion detection algorithms embedded in ‘intelligent’ observation systems).

These innovations raise a series of ethical, legal and sociological issues, which must be addressed from the early stage of technological design, and not merely after the technology has been developed up to the industrial dissemination stage. Indeed, the specificities of these technologies, and their potential societal impacts would jeopardize the efficiency of merely post hoc societal regulation. In this “value sensitive design” perspective, the interdisciplinary CRID-CITA research group has been involved for the last two years in the highly interdisciplinary MIAUCE project as to attune the technological design and the application scenarii construction to the relevant ethical, legal and societal considerations involved.

In this sense, the MIAUCE project constitutes a timely and original endeavour towards the development of a relevant methodology to develop fruitful interactions between human scientists, technological scientists, and the industrial sector. This endeavour, explicitly mandated by the European Commission, is particularly important on the threshold of a converging technology era. The CRID-CITA team’s efforts in the MIAUCE project therefore also provide a fruitful contribution to the current debates on the theorization and implementation of new modes of technological governance in Europe.