Research Papers

A pervasive design issue of AI systems is their explainability--how to provide appropriate information to help users understand the AI. The technical field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a rich toolbox of techniques. Designers are now tasked with the challenges of how to select the most suitable XAI techniques and translate them into UX solutions. Informed by our previous work studying design challenges around XAI UX, this work proposes a design process to tackle these challenges. We review our and related prior work to identify requirements that the process should fulfill, and accordingly, propose a Question-Driven Design Process that grounds the user needs, choices of XAI techniques, design, and evaluation of XAI UX all in the user questions. We provide a mapping guide between prototypical user questions and exemplars of XAI techniques to reframe the technical space of XAI, also serving as boundary objects to support collaboration between designers and AI engineers. We demonstrate it with a use case of designing XAI for healthcare adverse events prediction, and discuss lessons learned for tackling design challenges of AI systems.

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s. However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such debate has primarily focused on principles - the what of AI ethics - rather than on practices, the how. Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community's ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Therefore, our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs.

Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), require detailed maps of the locations of informal settlements. However, data regarding informal and formal settlements is primarily unavailable and if available is often incomplete. This is due, in part, to the cost and complexity of gathering data on a large scale. To address these challenges, we, in this work, provide three contributions. 1) A brand new machine learning data-set, purposely developed for informal settlement detection. 2) We show that it is possible to detect informal settlements using freely available low-resolution (LR) data, in contrast to previous studies that use very-high resolution (VHR) satellite and aerial imagery, something that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs. 3) We demonstrate two effective classification schemes on our curated data set, one that is cost-efficient for NGOs and another that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs, but has additional utility. We integrate these schemes into a semi-automated pipeline that converts either a LR or VHR satellite image into a binary map that encodes the locations of informal settlements.

The need for AI systems to provide explanations for their behaviour is now widely recognised as key to their adoption. In this paper, we examine the problem of trustworthy AI and explore what delivering this means in practice, with a focus on healthcare applications. Work in this area typically treats trustworthy AI as a problem of Human-Computer Interaction involving the individual user and an AI system. However, we argue here that this overlooks the important part played by organisational accountability in how people reason about and trust AI in socio-technical settings. To illustrate the importance of organisational accountability, we present findings from ethnographic studies of breast cancer screening and cancer treatment planning in multidisciplinary team meetings to show how participants made themselves accountable both to each other and to the organisations of which they are members. We use these findings to enrich existing understandings of the requirements for trustworthy AI and to outline some candidate solutions to the problems of making AI accountable both to individual users and organisationally. We conclude by outlining the implications of this for future work on the development of trustworthy AI, including ways in which our proposed solutions may be re-used in different application settings.

Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms in order to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals. This paper is the first to describe the 'speciesist bias' and investigate it in several different AI systems. Speciesist biases are learned and solidified by AI applications when they are trained on datasets in which speciesist patterns prevail. These patterns can be found in image recognition systems, large language models, and recommender systems. Therefore, AI technologies currently play a significant role in perpetuating and normalizing violence against animals. This can only be changed when AI fairness frameworks widen their scope and include mitigation measures for speciesist biases. This paper addresses the AI community in this regard and stresses the influence AI systems can have on either increasing or reducing the violence that is inflicted on animals, and especially on farmed animals.

Cardiovascular diseases and their associated disorder of heart failure are one of the major death causes globally, being a priority for doctors to detect and predict its onset and medical consequences. Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows doctors to discover clinical indicators and enhance their diagnosis and treatments. Specifically, explainable AI offers tools to improve the clinical prediction models that experience poor interpretability of their results. This work presents an explainability analysis and evaluation of a prediction model for heart failure survival by using a dataset that comprises 299 patients who suffered heart failure. The model employs a data workflow pipeline able to select the best ensemble tree algorithm as well as the best feature selection technique. Moreover, different post-hoc techniques have been used for the explainability analysis of the model. The paper's main contribution is an explainability-driven approach to select the best prediction model for HF survival based on an accuracy-explainability balance. Therefore, the most balanced explainable prediction model implements an Extra Trees classifier over 5 selected features (follow-up time, serum creatinine, ejection fraction, age and diabetes) out of 12, achieving a balanced-accuracy of 85.1% and 79.5% with cross-validation and new unseen data respectively. The follow-up time is the most influencing feature followed by serum-creatinine and ejection-fraction. The explainable prediction model for HF survival presented in this paper would improve a further adoption of clinical prediction models by providing doctors with intuitions to better understand the reasoning of, usually, black-box AI clinical solutions, and make more reasonable and data-driven decisions.

With the ever-growing achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the recent boosted enthusiasm in Financial Technology (FinTech), applications such as credit scoring have gained substantial academic interest. Credit scoring helps financial experts make better decisions regarding whether or not to accept a loan application, such that loans with a high probability of default are not accepted. Apart from the noisy and highly imbalanced data challenges faced by such credit scoring models, recent regulations such as the `right to explanation' introduced by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) have added the need for model interpretability to ensure that algorithmic decisions are understandable and coherent. An interesting concept that has been recently introduced is eXplainable AI (XAI), which focuses on making black-box models more interpretable. In this work, we present a credit scoring model that is both accurate and interpretable. For classification, state-of-the-art performance on the Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) and Lending Club (LC) Datasets is achieved using the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model. The model is then further enhanced with a 360-degree explanation framework, which provides different explanations (i.e. global, local feature-based and local instance-based) that are required by different people in different situations. Evaluation through the use of functionallygrounded, application-grounded and human-grounded analysis show that the explanations provided are simple, consistent as well as satisfy the six predetermined hypotheses testing for correctness, effectiveness, easy understanding, detail sufficiency and trustworthiness.

2019 Evolutionary Algorithms Review

Andrew N. Sloss, Steven Gustafson

Evolutionary algorithm research and applications began over 50 years ago. Like other artificial intelligence techniques, evolutionary algorithms will likely see increased use and development due to the increased availability of computation, more robust and available open source software libraries, and the increasing demand for artificial intelligence techniques. As these techniques become more adopted and capable, it is the right time to take a perspective of their ability to integrate into society and the human processes they intend to augment. In this review, we explore a new taxonomy of evolutionary algorithms and resulting classifications that look at five main areas: the ability to manage the control of the environment with limiters, the ability to explain and repeat the search process, the ability to understand input and output causality within a solution, the ability to manage algorithm bias due to data or user design, and lastly, the ability to add corrective measures. These areas are motivated by today's pressures on industry to conform to both societies concerns and new government regulatory rules. As many reviews of evolutionary algorithms exist, after motivating this new taxonomy, we briefly classify a broad range of algorithms and identify areas of future research.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has re-emerged in response to the development of modern AI and ML systems. These systems are complex and sometimes biased, but they nevertheless make decisions that impact our lives. XAI systems are frequently algorithm-focused; starting and ending with an algorithm that implements a basic untested idea about explainability. These systems are often not tested to determine whether the algorithm helps users accomplish any goals, and so their explainability remains unproven. We propose an alternative: to start with human-focused principles for the design, testing, and implementation of XAI systems, and implement algorithms to serve that purpose. In this paper, we review some of the basic concepts that have been used for user-centered XAI systems over the past 40 years of research. Based on these, we describe the "Self-Explanation Scorecard", which can help developers understand how they can empower users by enabling self-explanation. Finally, we present a set of empirically-grounded, user-centered design principles that may guide developers to create successful explainable systems.

Improved Explainability of Capsule Networks: Relevance Path by Agreement

Atefeh Shahroudnejad, Arash Mohammadi, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

Recent advancements in signal processing and machine learning domains have resulted in an extensive surge of interest in deep learning models due to their unprecedented performance and high accuracy for different and challenging problems of significant engineering importance. However, when such deep learning architectures are utilized for making critical decisions such as the ones that involve human lives (e.g., in medical applications), it is of paramount importance to understand, trust, and in one word "explain" the rational behind deep models' decisions. Currently, deep learning models are typically considered as black-box systems, which do not provide any clue on their internal processing actions. Although some recent efforts have been initiated to explain behavior and decisions of deep networks, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) domain is still in its infancy. In this regard, we consider capsule networks (referred to as CapsNets), which are novel deep structures; recently proposed as an alternative counterpart to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and posed to change the future of machine intelligence. In this paper, we investigate and analyze structures and behaviors of the CapsNets and illustrate potential explainability properties of such networks. Furthermore, we show possibility of transforming deep learning architectures in to transparent networks via incorporation of capsules in different layers instead of convolution layers of the CNNs.

Recently, the AI/ML research community has indicated an urgent need to establish Responsible AI (RAI) values and practices as part of the AI/ML lifecycle. Several organizations and communities are responding to this call by sharing RAI guidelines. However, there are gaps in awareness, deliberation, and execution of such practices for multi-disciplinary ML practitioners. This work contributes to the discussion by unpacking co-production challenges faced by practitioners as they align their RAI values. We interviewed 23 individuals, across 10 organizations, tasked to ship AI/ML based products while upholding RAI norms and found that both top-down and bottom-up institutional structures create burden for different roles preventing them from upholding RAI values, a challenge that is further exacerbated when executing conflicted values. We share multiple value levers used as strategies by the practitioners to resolve their challenges. We end our paper with recommendations for inclusive and equitable RAI value-practices, creating supportive organizational structures and opportunities to further aid practitioners.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made leapfrogs in development across all the industrial sectors especially when deep learning has been introduced. Deep learning helps to learn the behaviour of an entity through methods of recognising and interpreting patterns. Despite its limitless potential, the mystery is how deep learning algorithms make a decision in the first place. Explainable AI (XAI) is the key to unlocking AI and the black-box for deep learning. XAI is an AI model that is programmed to explain its goals, logic, and decision making so that the end users can understand. The end users can be domain experts, regulatory agencies, managers and executive board members, data scientists, users that use AI, with or without awareness, or someone who is affected by the decisions of an AI model. Chest CT has emerged as a valuable tool for the clinical diagnostic and treatment management of the lung diseases associated with COVID-19. AI can support rapid evaluation of CT scans to differentiate COVID-19 findings from other lung diseases. However, how these AI tools or deep learning algorithms reach such a decision and which are the most influential features derived from these neural networks with typically deep layers are not clear. The aim of this study is to propose and develop XAI strategies for COVID-19 classification models with an investigation of comparison. The results demonstrate promising quantification and qualitative visualisations that can further enhance the clinician's understanding and decision making with more granular information from the results given by the learned XAI models.