AI & Ethics

Mission Statement/Objectives
Alongside the rapid development and widespread application of AI across traditional industries, ethical issues have raised broad concerns regarding AI’s societal impacts, such as:  

- Uncertainty & Data Quality
- Black-Box Models (how decisions are made?)
- Bias & Fairness (due to origin of data used to train the model)
- Data Governance (privacy / IP / data ownership / traceability )
- Responsibility & Accountability (who is liable for errors)
- Human-in-the-Loop (how and which step?)
- Societal Impact (workforce change)
- Other long-term impact on people’s capacity

TG3.11 aims to address these concerns by defining

- Ethical principles
- Governance mechanisms
- Accountability structures

tailored to the engineering domain.

Missions of the TG3.11 include:

- Increase awareness of ethical and safety challenges in AI for civil engineering
- Identify, analyse, and prioritise risks and potential harms from AI use across engineering workflows
- Develop practical best-practice guidelines and advisory notes to support safe, responsible, and trustworthy AI adoption in engineering practice and policymaking

Scope & Limitation

A group of tasks will be carried out to achieve our mission:

Task 1: Raise Awareness — clarify ethical & safety challenges; make the community understand the problem

Task 2: Assess Risks — analyze potential harms; priorities key risks across engineering workflows

Task 3: Provide Guidelines & Policy Advice — propose best practices for engineers and recommendations for policymakers

Expected Project Output

From Task 1, led by Xiaomeng Wang:

- A baseline awareness report or paper summarizing key issues and why they matter for engineering practice

From Task 2, led by Alexandros Nikitas:

- A risk and impact assessment set (report and papers)
- A small-scale conference on the AI related ethical risks discussion
- Website / webpage to provide the information for public

From Task 3, led by Tiago Ribeiro:

- Practical guidelines for engineers, firms, and operators
- Policy notes for higher-level decision makers and future standard-setting efforts

Start Date: 1 December 2025

Target Date of Completion: 1 December 2029

Chair
Xiaomeng Wang, Switzerland

Vice Chair

Tiago Ribeiro, Portugal

Members

Alexandros Nikitas, Greece

Barry Keung, United States

Frank Braun, Germany

Joshua Kardon, United States

Magnús Arasom, Iceland

Martin Svendsen, Denmark

Zhen Sun, China

Marco Civera, Italy

Tobias Petschke, Canada