Irish SME providing ethics-by-design, human rights impact assessment, and responsible AI governance for European security and law enforcement projects.
Trilateral Research is an Irish SME specializing in the ethical, social, and legal dimensions of security and AI technologies. They provide responsible innovation expertise — ethics assessments, human rights impact analysis, and societal research — embedded directly into technical EU security and law enforcement projects. Their work bridges the gap between technology developers and the social implications of deploying AI, surveillance, and crisis management tools, ensuring these systems are designed with ethics built in from the start.
Core contributor across SIENNA, TechEthos, popAI, COPKIT, HEROES, TRUST aWARE, and multiple law enforcement projects where they handle ethical governance and human rights impact.
Dedicated ethics-by-design work in popAI, TechEthos, SIENNA, TRACE, and OPTIMAI, covering AI for law enforcement, manufacturing, and societal applications.
Contributed social science and risk communication expertise to STAMINA, PANDEM-2, COVINFORM, and INGENIOUS for emergency response and pandemic modelling.
Provided human-factor and ethical oversight in SOTER (finance cybersecurity), INSPECTr (digital forensics), CC-DRIVER (cybercriminality), TRUST aWARE, and HEROES.
Worked on decentralised trustworthy social media in EUNOMIA and misinformation dynamics in COVINFORM.
Applied co-design and intersectionality frameworks in TRIPS (inclusive transport), REAL DEAL (environmental justice), and PaCE (civic engagement).
In their early H2020 period (2017-2019), Trilateral focused on research ethics governance, ethical codes, and legal frameworks for emerging technologies like genomics and human enhancement (SIENNA, PREFET). From 2020 onward, their work shifted decisively toward applied AI ethics, pandemic crisis management, and ethics-by-design for law enforcement AI tools — reflecting the broader European push for trustworthy AI and the COVID-19 response. Their most recent projects (popAI, REAL DEAL, HEROES) show a growing emphasis on gender sensitivity, environmental justice, and socially responsible AI deployment.
Trilateral is moving from broad technology ethics advisory toward specialized AI ethics-by-design for security and law enforcement, positioning them as a go-to partner for any EU project requiring embedded responsible AI governance.
Trilateral never coordinates projects but contributes as either a participant (17 projects) or third party (10 projects), indicating they serve as a specialized ethics and social science module plugged into larger technical consortia. With 367 unique partners across 46 countries, they are a highly networked connector — not loyal to a small circle but sought out by diverse consortia needing responsible innovation expertise. This breadth makes them easy to integrate into new partnerships, as they are accustomed to working across disciplines and institutional cultures.
Trilateral has collaborated with 367 distinct partners across 46 countries, giving them one of the broadest networks among Irish SMEs in H2020 security research. Their partnerships span law enforcement agencies, universities, technology developers, and public authorities across virtually all EU member states and beyond.
Trilateral occupies a rare niche: a private company that provides social science and ethics expertise at a level usually associated with university departments, but with the agility and project delivery speed of an SME. Their combination of security domain knowledge and ethics-by-design methodology makes them particularly valuable for Horizon Europe calls that mandate responsible AI and human rights impact assessments. For consortium builders, they solve the common problem of needing credible ethics work packages without relying on slow-moving academic partners.
