Japan's Aisin Seiki and Canada's Element AI (EAI) have began a joint development project on explainability in artificial intelligence (AI). Aisin says EAI is a world leading company established in 2016 by JF Gagne (CEO) together with Yoshua Bengio (PhD.) of Universite de Montreal to offer artificial intelligence-powered services and software solutions for businesses globally. 

The company says Prof Yoshua Bengio is said to be one of the world's three major experts in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning, receiving the Turing Award (so-called Nobel Prize in computing) in 2019. With a team specialising in research on explainability in artificial intelligence, EAI has an advantage in making important artificial intelligence components on its own and providing advisory services by combining them in response to requests or needs from clients.

Through cooperation with EAI, the Aisin Group aims to solve the black box problem with pass/fail results, which has become a challenge for industrial application of artificial intelligence in automobile-related production engineering in the group, by making the grounds of the pass/fail results explainable, and thereby prevent production quality deterioration due to adoption of artificial intelligence and promote active utilisation of artificial intelligence.

In March 2018, the Aisin Group established a consolidated subsidiary engaging in fund business for the purpose of utilising state-of-the-art technologies of companies with outstanding technologies, within Pegasus Tech Ventures in Silicon Valley, and has been promoting open innovation activities since then. The Aisin Group says it will further accelerate collaboration with companies and universities across the world that have advanced technical capabilities and thereby help promote sustainable industrialisation by engineering innovation.