Month: August 2026

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WhereIsIt Project Comes to an End

On August 3, 2026, the final presentation of the WhereIsIt project took place at the FHNW School of Business. The project introduced a voice-based assistant that helps blind and visually impaired people remember and retrieve the locations of everyday objects through simple spoken interaction. Designed with a clear focus on accessibility and ease of use, the prototype works entirely offline, stores all data locally, and avoids cloud services and cameras, ensuring that sensitive personal information remains under the user’s control. The streamlined push-to-talk concept makes the application intuitive and focused on its core task: remembering where things are, while its local architecture demonstrates how AI can support users without compromising privacy. The project was initiated by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel of the FHNW School of Business, and the prototype was developed by Damian Huckele as part of his bachelor’s thesis. The project builds on several years of research into Inclusive AI at the FHNW School of Business. In 2024, Oliver Bendel presented his paper “How Can Generative AI Enhance the Well-being of the Blind?” at the AAAI Spring Symposium “Impact of GenAI on Social and Individual Well-being”. Based on extensive tests of the Be My Eyes app and its MLLM-powered Be My AI feature, the paper demonstrated how multimodal AI can significantly increase independence and environmental awareness for blind and visually impaired people, while also discussing the ethical implications of AI-mediated perception. This research laid an important conceptual foundation for subsequent projects. In 2025, the VISUAL project, initiated by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel and implemented by Doris Jovic, explored how multimodal AI could make wildlife livestreams accessible through detailed spoken scene descriptions generated from public webcam images. WhereIsIt now extends this line of work by shifting the focus from perception to memory support. Together, these activities illustrate how Inclusive AI can address different everyday challenges through practical, privacy-conscious, and user-centered applications that promote greater independence for blind and visually impaired people.

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A Decade Before Article 50: AI Transparency in the European Parliament

Article 50, “Transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems,” of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) states: “Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use.” Ten years earlier, the European Parliament had already sought advice from Oliver Bendel on this very topic. In his presentation, “Moral and Immoral Machines”, delivered at the event “Merging of Man and Machine: Questions of Ethics in Dealing with Emerging Technology” in Brussels on September 8, 2016, Bendel introduced GOODBOT, a chatbot he had initiated in 2013 as part of his research on machine ethics. GOODBOT featured several escalation levels and repeatedly made it clear to users that it was merely a machine. Other speakers in the “Ethics & Society” session included Enno Park, Dana Lewis, Yvonne Hofstetter, and Constanze Kurz. At the “Digital Europe” Working Group conference on robotics on November 8, 2017, Bendel also spoke online about related issues in machine ethics. Referring to a care robot, he raised the question: “Should the robot make clear that it’s just a machine?” The transparency obligations set out in Article 50 entered into force on August 2, 2026 (Photo: Sebastian Raible).