As consensus across the various published AI ethics principles is approached, a gap remains between high-level principles and practical techniques that can be readily adopted to design and develop responsible AI systems. We examine the practices and experiences of researchers and engineers from Australia's national scientific research agency (CSIRO), who are involved in designing and developing AI systems for a range of purposes. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine how the practices of the participants relate to and align with a set of high-level AI ethics principles proposed by the Australian Government. The principles comprise: Privacy Protection & Security, Reliability & Safety, Transparency & Explainability, Fairness, Contestability, Accountability, Human-centred Values, and Human, Social & Environmental Wellbeing. The insights of the researchers and engineers as well as the challenges that arose for them in the practical application of the principles are examined. Finally, we propose a set of organisational responses (learning, process, practice, strategy, policy) to support the implementation of high-level AI ethics principles into practice.
Interactive machine learning (IML) is a field of research that explores how to leverage both human and computational abilities in decision making systems. IML represents a collaboration between multiple complementary human and machine intelligent systems working as a team, each with their own unique abilities and limitations. This teamwork might mean that both systems take actions at the same time, or in sequence. Two major open research questions in the field of IML are: "How should we design systems that can learn to make better decisions over time with human interaction?" and "How should we evaluate the design and deployment of such systems?" A lack of appropriate consideration for the humans involved can lead to problematic system behaviour, and issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency. Thus, our goal with this work is to present a human-centred guide to designing and evaluating IML systems while mitigating risks. This guide is intended to be used by machine learning practitioners who are responsible for the health, safety, and well-being of interacting humans. An obligation of responsibility for public interaction means acting with integrity, honesty, fairness, and abiding by applicable legal statutes. With these values and principles in mind, we as a machine learning research community can better achieve goals of augmenting human skills and abilities. This practical guide therefore aims to support many of the responsible decisions necessary throughout the iterative design, development, and dissemination of IML systems.
Common tasks encountered in epidemiology, including disease incidence estimation and causal inference, rely on predictive modeling. Constructing a predictive model can be thought of as learning a prediction function, i.e., a function that takes as input covariate data and outputs a predicted value. Many strategies for learning these functions from data are available, from parametric regressions to machine learning algorithms. It can be challenging to choose an approach, as it is impossible to know in advance which one is the most suitable for a particular dataset and prediction task at hand. The super learner (SL) is an algorithm that alleviates concerns over selecting the one "right" strategy while providing the freedom to consider many of them, such as those recommended by collaborators, used in related research, or specified by subject-matter experts. It is an entirely pre-specified and data-adaptive strategy for predictive modeling. To ensure the SL is well-specified for learning the prediction function, the analyst does need to make a few important choices. In this Education Corner article, we provide step-by-step guidelines for making these choices, walking the reader through each of them and providing intuition along the way. In doing so, we aim to empower the analyst to tailor the SL specification to their prediction task, thereby ensuring their SL performs as well as possible. A flowchart provides a concise, easy-to-follow summary of key suggestions and heuristics, based on our accumulated experience, and guided by theory.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum, and its importance for the future of work in many areas, such as medicine and banking, is continuously rising. However, insights on the effective collaboration of humans and AI are still rare. Typically, AI supports humans in decision-making by addressing human limitations. However, it may also evoke human bias, especially in the form of automation bias as an over-reliance on AI advice. We aim to shed light on the potential to influence automation bias by explainable AI (XAI). In this pre-test, we derive a research model and describe our study design. Subsequentially, we conduct an online experiment with regard to hotel review classifications and discuss first results. We expect our research to contribute to the design and development of safe hybrid intelligence systems.
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is mined from software projects, however, requires extensive processing and needs to be handled with utmost care to ensure valid conclusions. Since the software development practices and tools have changed over two decades, we aim to understand the state-of-the-art research workflows and to highlight potential challenges. We employ a systematic literature review by sampling over one thousand papers from leading conferences and by analyzing the 286 most relevant papers from the perspective of data workflows, methodologies, reproducibility, and tools. We found that an important part of the research workflow involving dataset selection was particularly problematic, which raises questions about the generality of the results in existing literature. Furthermore, we found a considerable number of papers provide little or no reproducibility instructions -- a substantial deficiency for a data-intensive field. In fact, 33% of papers provide no information on how their data was retrieved. Based on these findings, we propose ways to address these shortcomings via existing tools and also provide recommendations to improve research workflows and the reproducibility of research.
Requirements engineering (RE) activities for Machine Learning (ML) are not well-established and researched in the literature. Many issues and challenges exist when specifying, designing, and developing ML-enabled systems. Adding more focus on RE for ML can help to develop more reliable ML-enabled systems. Based on insights collected from previous work and industrial experiences, we propose a catalogue of 45 concerns to be considered when specifying ML-enabled systems, covering five different perspectives we identified as relevant for such systems: objectives, user experience, infrastructure, model, and data. Examples of such concerns include the execution engine and telemetry for the infrastructure perspective, and explainability and reproducibility for the model perspective. We conducted a focus group session with eight software professionals with experience developing ML-enabled systems to validate the importance, quality and feasibility of using our catalogue. The feedback allowed us to improve the catalogue and confirmed its practical relevance. The main research contribution of this work consists in providing a validated set of concerns grouped into perspectives that can be used by requirements engineers to support the specification of ML-enabled systems.
Present-day atomistic simulations generate long trajectories of ever more complex systems. Analyzing these data, discovering metastable states, and uncovering their nature is becoming increasingly challenging. In this paper, we first use the variational approach to conformation dynamics to discover the slowest dynamical modes of the simulations. This allows the different metastable states of the system to be located and organized hierarchically. The physical descriptors that characterize metastable states are discovered by means of a machine learning method. We show in the cases of two proteins, Chignolin and Bovine Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor, how such analysis can be effortlessly performed in a matter of seconds. Another strength of our approach is that it can be applied to the analysis of both unbiased and biased simulations.
Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Explainable Recommendation refers to the personalized recommendation algorithms that address the problem of why -- they not only provide the user with the recommendations, but also make the user aware why such items are recommended by generating recommendation explanations, which help to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, persuasiveness, and user satisfaction of recommender systems. In recent years, a large number of explainable recommendation approaches -- especially model-based explainable recommendation algorithms -- have been proposed and adopted in real-world systems. In this survey, we review the work on explainable recommendation that has been published in or before the year of 2018. We first high-light the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation itself in terms of three aspects: 1) We provide a chronological research line of explanations in recommender systems, including the user study approaches in the early years, as well as the more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a taxonomy for explainable recommendation algorithms, including user-based, item-based, model-based, and post-model explanations. 3) We summarize the application of explainable recommendation in different recommendation tasks, including product recommendation, social recommendation, POI recommendation, etc. We devote a chapter to discuss the explanation perspectives in the broader IR and machine learning settings, as well as their relationship with explainable recommendation research. We end the survey by discussing potential future research directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area.