We met Viktor Seibert<\/strong><\/span>, a German social entrepreneur and founder of Sportellino<\/strong><\/span>, a nonprofit digital assistant based in Rome. He\u00a0is dedicated to creating innovative solutions<\/span><\/strong> that aim to make everyday life more accessible<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n We\u2019re excited to dive deeper into his work and vision, exploring how his projects contribute to making the world a more inclusive and interconnected place.<\/p>\n Tell us about yourself and how the idea for the App “Sportellino” came about.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The idea for Sportellino emerged during my Master\u2019s in Migration and Development at Sapienza University in Rome. While writing my thesis on the intersection of AI and migration, I realized that a tool like Sportellino could directly and anonymously help many people, while also easing the workload of help desks and social workers<\/span>.<\/p>\n Most bureaucratic questions in this area rotate around the same topics, so it made sense to create a scalable solution<\/span> to address them.<\/p>\n Before this, I worked in the startup scene in Berlin, where I learned the value of building pragmatic solutions that deliver immediate impact<\/span>. I\u2019m not ideological, nor interested in politicizing migration. Even though I studied it in university, I am a bit lazy and not interested in academically dissecting the phenomenon in every detail, but in creating tools that make a tangible, immediate difference.<\/p>\n Many migrant people have little information about their rights and duties and often because of this they also become victims of exploitation or injustice. Moreover, the active citizenship of migrant people and the first form of integration in societies also passes through correct and aware information about laws and procedures. How can this project help in this regard?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Not clearly understanding what you are legally entitled to \u2014 and what you are obliged to do \u2014 takes away part of your autonomy<\/span>. I believe that a solution like Sportellino can help overcome these barriers<\/span> by making rights and duties more transparent and accessible<\/span>. In this way, it not only prevents exploitation and injustice but also strengthens integration and active citizenship.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence is profoundly changing many social realities and this arouses enthusiasm on the one hand and fear on the other. Is it possible to talk about an ethic\u00a0of AI and specifically how new technologies can be put at the service of the common good and the most vulnerable people?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n One common theme arising from AI-driven systems is the phenomenon of algorithmic racial bias<\/span>. This refers to the effect where AI reproduces or amplifies racist prejudices.<\/p>\n AI systems are optimized to produce outputs that humans find useful or agreeable, which means they can end up mimicking our own biases, including racist ones. That is something we have to be very careful about with our solution: we don\u2019t want Sportellino to morph into a digital help desk that discriminates against users<\/span> based on, for example, their country of origin. I see this less as an inherent flaw of AI itself and more as a technical bug that must be prevented from the outset.<\/p>\n I am very far from being an AI-expert but I guess it is becoming pretty clear that Artificial Intelligence is gonna be absolutely everywhere in the future and often as invisible as the air we breathe<\/span>, whether we like it or not. That\u2019s why I think civil society should adopt and shape this technology as much as possible<\/span>, instead of leaving it mostly in the hands of companies and institutions with limited oversight.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Viktor Seibert<\/span><\/strong><\/em> is a German social entrepreneur and founder of Sportellino, a nonprofit digital assistant based in Rome. He holds a Master\u2019s degree in Migration and Development from Sapienza University of Rome and a Bachelor\u2019s in Political Science.\u00a0With experience in Berlin\u2019s startup scene and in cultural initiatives through his institution Studio\u00a0Hanniball, Viktor likes developing creative solutions that help make everyday life more accessible.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archivio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6109"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6237,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions\/6237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simieducation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>My father was a lawmaker, so I have a personal and family-related connection to this topic. I strongly believe that laws should be written in a way that everyone can easily understand them, and obviously they should be truly accessible to all who are subject to them. Unfortunately, this is often not the case: even for native citizens, fully grasping their rights and obligations is difficult. For foreigners, this challenge is even greater due to language and cultural barriers<\/span>, and sometimes also a sense of shame in asking<\/span> for help.<\/p>\n