The European Commission is presenting its new, long-awaited regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This focus on AI on the part of the European Commission brings forward not only valuable questions for the continued evolution and safe deployment of this technology, but opportunities for ensuring the digital sovereignty of Europe for the future. To help address these questions and provide support to the deployment of AI in Europe, European standards play a key role. To organise and develop standardization work on this issue, CEN and CENELEC have established the CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 21 ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

This group brings together experts that will implement and lead the recommendations available in CEN and CENELEC’s response to the EC White Paper on AI and CEN and CENELEC’s Road Map on AI. 

The Joint Technical Committee, whose Secretariat is held by DS, the Danish Standardization Body, will be responsible for the development and adoption of standards for AI and related data, as well as provide guidance to other Technical Committees concerned with AI. Standards are relevant for the evolution of AI for a variety of reasons:

• they provide expertise to an emerging technology, ensuring safety and security for products and services;
• they are intrinsically designed to be an inclusive and market-driven instrument of support for European regulation through the New Legislative Framework, benefitting the Single Market and reducing barriers to trade.  

EN ISO/IEC 27701 “Security techniques. Extension to ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002 for privacy information management. Requirements and guidelines” sets out generic requirements for a Privacy Information Management System whose guidance can be adapted by organisations according to their context and applicable obligations. It can be considered as an international framework, in which it is possible to define more particular, regional refinements.

CEN and CENELEC’s Joint Committee 13 ‘Cybersecurity and Data Protection’ (CEN-CLC/JTC 13) has now started a new project, which aims at developing a standard that offers such refinements for a European context: the aim is to develop guidelines that organisations will be able to use for the purpose of demonstrating compliance with their obligations relating to GDPR.

CEN and CENELEC are putting significant effort towards integrating standardization with innovation and research in Europe. This strategic initiative was originally conceived in the CEN-CENELEC Innovation Plan (2018) and now supports Strategy 2030 objectives. The projects and actions to achieve this integration are focused towards 3 dimensions:

• New topics for standardization – deploying and reinforcing existing channels and sources to identify new standardization areas for CEN and CENELEC. Activities include working with the EC DG JRC (Joint Research Centre) later this year to identify possible upcoming topics for the common CEN-CENELEC – JRC action "Putting Science into Standards 2022’’ that will involve engaging with stakeholders (researchers, industry, policy makers, standardizers…) to initiate a discussion on opportunities and needs for which CEN and CENELEC can enable the development of the necessary standards.

 Accessibility prevents or removes barriers to the use of mainstream products and services. CEN and CENELEC, as two of the officially recognised European Standardization Bodies, are on the frontline to achieve accessibility in Europe: standards are powerful tools to integrate and strengthen accessibility aspects providing a framework, requirements and specifications for accessible products and services.

To steer and streamline its work on accessibility across all relevant sectors, CEN’s Strategic Advisory Group on Accessibility (SAGA) recently developed the brochure “How to address accessibility in standardization”: this information leaflet provides guidelines to CEN and CENELEC’s technical bodies on how to include accessibility aspects in their standards development work.

2021 is the European Year of Rail. On this occasion, CEN and CENELEC are proud to highlight the important role European standards play to ensure the well-functioning of a key sector for the future of Europe. Standardization on railways application is part of CEN and CENELEC’s wider work on transportation, a complex and large portfolio: it includes 1234 standards from CEN and CENELEC. These standards are mainly developed by two Technical Committees (TCs), CEN/TC 256 'Railway Applications' and CLC/TC 9X 'Electrical and electronic applications for railways'. In particular, standards on rail cover a wide range of topics specifically related to railways applications (products, processes and services), such as, among others, safety, rolling stock capacity, system efficiency, as well as cybersecurity, digitalisation, and automatic couplings. This work on rail contributes massively to the development of safe, innovative and efficient railway systems infrastructure, rolling stock and systems, and supports the EU in its strategic ambitions.