Research Papers

The prevalence of dementia has increased over time as global life expectancy improves and populations age. An individual's risk of developing dementia is influenced by various genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors, among others. Predicting dementia risk may enable individuals to employ mitigation strategies or lifestyle changes to delay dementia onset. Current computational approaches to dementia prediction only return risk upon narrow categories of variables and do not account for interactions between different risk variables. The proposed framework utilizes a novel holistic approach to dementia risk prediction and is the first to incorporate various sources of tabular environmental pollution and lifestyle factor data with network systems biology-based genetic data. LightGBM gradient boosting was employed to ensure validity of included factors. This approach successfully models interactions between variables through an original weighted integration method coined Sysable. Multiple machine learning models trained the algorithm to reduce reliance on a single model. The developed approach surpassed all existing dementia risk prediction approaches, with a sensitivity of 85%, specificity of 99%, geometric accuracy of 92%, and AUROC of 91.7%. A transfer learning model was implemented as well. De-biasing algorithms were run on the model via the AI Fairness 360 Library. Effects of demographic disparities on dementia prevalence were analyzed to potentially highlight areas in need and promote equitable and accessible care. The resulting model was additionally integrated into a user-friendly app providing holistic predictions and personalized risk mitigation strategies. The developed model successfully employs holistic computational dementia risk prediction for clinical use.

Hate speech moderation remains a challenging task for social media platforms. Human-AI collaborative systems offer the potential to combine the strengths of humans' reliability and the scalability of machine learning to tackle this issue effectively. While methods for task handover in human-AI collaboration exist that consider the costs of incorrect predictions, insufficient attention has been paid to accurately estimating these costs. In this work, we propose a value-sensitive rejection mechanism that automatically rejects machine decisions for human moderation based on users' value perceptions regarding machine decisions. We conduct a crowdsourced survey study with 160 participants to evaluate their perception of correct and incorrect machine decisions in the domain of hate speech detection, as well as occurrences where the system rejects making a prediction. Here, we introduce Magnitude Estimation, an unbounded scale, as the preferred method for measuring user (dis)agreement with machine decisions. Our results show that Magnitude Estimation can provide a reliable measurement of participants' perception of machine decisions. By integrating user-perceived value into human-AI collaboration, we further show that it can guide us in 1) determining when to accept or reject machine decisions to obtain the optimal total value a model can deliver and 2) selecting better classification models as compared to the more widely used target of model accuracy.

This paper argues that Machine Learning (ML) algorithms must be educated. ML-trained algorithms moral decisions are ubiquitous in human society. Sometimes reverting the societal advances governments, NGOs and civil society have achieved with great effort in the last decades or are yet on the path to be achieved. While their decisions have an incommensurable impact on human societies, these algorithms are within the least educated agents known (data incomplete, un-inclusive, or biased). ML algorithms are not something separate from our human idiosyncrasy but an enactment of our most implicit prejudices and biases. Some research is devoted to responsibility assignment as a strategy to tackle immoral AI behaviour. Yet this paper argues that the solution for AI ethical decision-making resides in algorithm education (as opposed to the training) of ML. Drawing from an analogy between ML and child education for social responsibility, the paper offers clear directions for responsible and sustainable AI design, specifically with respect to how to educate algorithms to decide ethically.

This workshop Report Out focuses on the foundational elements of trustworthy AI and OR technology, and how to ensure all AI and OR systems implement these elements in their system designs. Four sessions on various topics within Trustworthy AI were held, these being Fairness, Explainable AI/Causality, Robustness/Privacy, and Human Alignment and Human-Computer Interaction. Following discussions of each of these topics, workshop participants also brainstormed challenge problems which require the collaboration of AI and OR researchers and will result in the integration of basic techniques from both fields to eventually benefit societal needs.

ComplAI: Theory of A Unified Framework for Multi-factor Assessment of Black-Box Supervised Machine Learning Models

Arkadipta De, Satya Swaroop Gudipudi, Sourab Panchanan +1

The advances in Artificial Intelligence are creating new opportunities to improve lives of people around the world, from business to healthcare, from lifestyle to education. For example, some systems profile the users using their demographic and behavioral characteristics to make certain domain-specific predictions. Often, such predictions impact the life of the user directly or indirectly (e.g., loan disbursement, determining insurance coverage, shortlisting applications, etc.). As a result, the concerns over such AI-enabled systems are also increasing. To address these concerns, such systems are mandated to be responsible i.e., transparent, fair, and explainable to developers and end-users. In this paper, we present ComplAI, a unique framework to enable, observe, analyze and quantify explainability, robustness, performance, fairness, and model behavior in drift scenarios, and to provide a single Trust Factor that evaluates different supervised Machine Learning models not just from their ability to make correct predictions but from overall responsibility perspective. The framework helps users to (a) connect their models and enable explanations, (b) assess and visualize different aspects of the model, such as robustness, drift susceptibility, and fairness, and (c) compare different models (from different model families or obtained through different hyperparameter settings) from an overall perspective thereby facilitating actionable recourse for improvement of the models. It is model agnostic and works with different supervised machine learning scenarios (i.e., Binary Classification, Multi-class Classification, and Regression) and frameworks. It can be seamlessly integrated with any ML life-cycle framework. Thus, this already deployed framework aims to unify critical aspects of Responsible AI systems for regulating the development process of such real systems.

The present study uses domain experts to estimate welfare levels and indicators from high-resolution satellite imagery. We use the wealth quintiles from the 2015 Tanzania DHS dataset as ground truth data. We analyse the performance of the visual estimation of relative wealth at the cluster level and compare these with wealth rankings from the DHS survey of 2015 for that country using correlations, ordinal regressions and multinomial logistic regressions. Of the 608 clusters, 115 received the same ratings from human experts and the independent DHS rankings. For 59 percent of the clusters, experts ratings were slightly lower. On the one hand, significant positive predictors of wealth are the presence of modern roofs and wider roads. For instance, the log odds of receiving a rating in a higher quintile on the wealth rankings is 0.917 points higher on average for clusters with buildings with slate or tile roofing compared to those without. On the other hand, significant negative predictors included poor road coverage, low to medium greenery coverage, and low to medium building density. Other key predictors from the multinomial regression model include settlement structure and farm sizes. These findings are significant to the extent that these correlates of wealth and poverty are visually readable from satellite imagery and can be used to train machine learning models in poverty predictions. Using these features for training will contribute to more transparent ML models and, consequently, explainable AI.

The popularity of machine learning has increased the risk of unfair models getting deployed in high-stake applications, such as justice system, drug/vaccination design, and medical diagnosis. Although there are effective methods to train fair models from scratch, how to automatically reveal and explain the unfairness of a trained model remains a challenging task. Revealing unfairness of machine learning models in interpretable fashion is a critical step towards fair and trustworthy AI. In this paper, we systematically tackle the novel task of revealing unfair models by mining interpretable evidence (RUMIE). The key idea is to find solid evidence in the form of a group of data instances discriminated most by the model. To make the evidence interpretable, we also find a set of human-understandable key attributes and decision rules that characterize the discriminated data instances and distinguish them from the other non-discriminated data. As demonstrated by extensive experiments on many real-world data sets, our method finds highly interpretable and solid evidence to effectively reveal the unfairness of trained models. Moreover, it is much more scalable than all of the baseline methods.

AI plays a key role in current cyberspace and future immersive ecosystems that pinpoint user experiences. Thus, the trustworthiness of such AI systems is vital as failures in these systems can cause serious user harm. Although there are related works on exploring trustworthy AI (TAI) metrics in the current cyberspace, ecosystems towards user-centered services, such as the metaverse, are much more complicated in terms of system performance and user experience assessment, thus posing challenges for the applicability of existing approaches. Thus, we give an overlook on fairness, privacy and robustness, across the historical path from existing approaches. Eventually, we propose a research agenda towards systematic yet user-centered TAI in immersive ecosystems.

Choosing an algorithmic fairness metric for an online marketplace: Detecting and quantifying algorithmic bias on LinkedIn

YinYin Yu, Guillaume Saint-Jacques

In this paper, we derive an algorithmic fairness metric from the fairness notion of equal opportunity for equally qualified candidates for recommendation algorithms commonly used by two-sided marketplaces. We borrow from the economic literature on discrimination to arrive at a test for detecting bias that is solely attributable to the algorithm, as opposed to other sources such as societal inequality or human bias on the part of platform users. We use the proposed method to measure and quantify algorithmic bias with respect to gender of two algorithms used by LinkedIn, a popular online platform used by job seekers and employers. Moreover, we introduce a framework and the rationale for distinguishing algorithmic bias from human bias, both of which can potentially exist on a two-sided platform where algorithms make recommendations to human users. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of a few other common algorithmic fairness metrics and why they do not capture the fairness notion of equal opportunity for equally qualified candidates.

Machine learning is used in medicine to support physicians in examination, diagnosis, and predicting outcomes. One of the most dynamic area is the usage of patient generated health data from intensive care units. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how we advance cross-patient ML model development by combining the patient's demographics data with their physiological data. We used a population of patients undergoing Carotid Enderarterectomy (CEA), where we studied differences in model performance and explainability when trained for all patients and one patient at a time. The results show that patients' demographics has a large impact on the performance and explainability and thus trustworthiness. We conclude that we can increase trust in ML models in a cross-patient context, by careful selection of models and patients based on their demographics and the surgical procedure.

Numerous COVID-19 clinical decision support systems have been developed. However many of these systems do not have the merit for validity due to methodological shortcomings including algorithmic bias. Methods Logistic regression models were created to predict COVID-19 mortality, ventilator status and inpatient status using a real-world dataset consisting of four hospitals in New York City and analyzed for biases against race, gender and age. Simple thresholding adjustments were applied in the training process to establish more equitable models. Results Compared to the naively trained models, the calibrated models showed a 57% decrease in the number of biased trials, while predictive performance, measured by area under the receiver/operating curve (AUC), remained unchanged. After calibration, the average sensitivity of the predictive models increased from 0.527 to 0.955. Conclusion We demonstrate that naively training and deploying machine learning models on real world data for predictive analytics of COVID-19 has a high risk of bias. Simple implemented adjustments or calibrations during model training can lead to substantial and sustained gains in fairness on subsequent deployment.

This report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute covers the most salient progress in research and reporting over the second quarter of 2021 in the field of AI ethics with a special emphasis on "Environment and AI", "Creativity and AI", and "Geopolitics and AI." The report also features an exclusive piece titled "Critical Race Quantum Computer" that applies ideas from quantum physics to explain the complexities of human characteristics and how they can and should shape our interactions with each other. The report also features special contributions on the subject of pedagogy in AI ethics, sociology and AI ethics, and organizational challenges to implementing AI ethics in practice. Given MAIEI's mission to highlight scholars from around the world working on AI ethics issues, the report also features two spotlights sharing the work of scholars operating in Singapore and Mexico helping to shape policy measures as they relate to the responsible use of technology. The report also has an extensive section covering the gamut of issues when it comes to the societal impacts of AI covering areas of bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, fairness, interpretability, disinformation, policymaking, law, regulations, and moral philosophy.