Research Papers

AI is increasingly being offered 'as a service' (AIaaS). This entails service providers offering customers access to pre-built AI models and services, for tasks such as object recognition, text translation, text-to-voice conversion, and facial recognition, to name a few. The offerings enable customers to easily integrate a range of powerful AI-driven capabilities into their applications. Customers access these models through the provider's APIs, sending particular data to which models are applied, the results of which returned. However, there are many situations in which the use of AI can be problematic. AIaaS services typically represent generic functionality, available 'at a click'. Providers may therefore, for reasons of reputation or responsibility, seek to ensure that the AIaaS services they offer are being used by customers for 'appropriate' purposes. This paper introduces and explores the concept whereby AIaaS providers uncover situations of possible service misuse by their customers. Illustrated through topical examples, we consider the technical usage patterns that could signal situations warranting scrutiny, and raise some of the legal and technical challenges of monitoring for misuse. In all, by introducing this concept, we indicate a potential area for further inquiry from a range of perspectives.

Fragmentation, echo chambers, and their amelioration in social networks have been a growing concern in the academic and non-academic world. This paper shows how, under the assumption of homophily, echo chambers and fragmentation are system-immanent phenomena of highly flexible social networks, even under ideal conditions for heterogeneity. We achieve this by finding an analytical, network-based solution to the Schelling model and by proving that weak ties do not hinder the process. Furthermore, we derive that no level of positive algorithmic bias in the form of rewiring is capable of preventing fragmentation and its effect on reducing the fragmentation speed is negligible.

Algorithmic modeling relies on limited information in data to extrapolate outcomes for unseen scenarios, often embedding an element of arbitrariness in its decisions. A perspective on this arbitrariness that has recently gained interest is multiplicity-the study of arbitrariness across a set of "good models", i.e., those likely to be deployed in practice. In this work, we systemize the literature on multiplicity by: (a) formalizing the terminology around model design choices and their contribution to arbitrariness, (b) expanding the definition of multiplicity to incorporate underrepresented forms beyond just predictions and explanations, (c) clarifying the distinction between multiplicity and other lenses of arbitrariness, i.e., uncertainty and variance, and (d) distilling the benefits and potential risks of multiplicity into overarching trends, situating it within the broader landscape of responsible AI. We conclude by identifying open research questions and highlighting emerging trends in this young but rapidly growing area of research.

Auditing the Use of Language Models to Guide Hiring Decisions

Johann D. Gaebler, Sharad Goel, Aziz Huq +1

Regulatory efforts to protect against algorithmic bias have taken on increased urgency with rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), which are machine learning models that can achieve performance rivaling human experts on a wide array of tasks. A key theme of these initiatives is algorithmic "auditing," but current regulations -- as well as the scientific literature -- provide little guidance on how to conduct these assessments. Here we propose and investigate one approach for auditing algorithms: correspondence experiments, a widely applied tool for detecting bias in human judgements. In the employment context, correspondence experiments aim to measure the extent to which race and gender impact decisions by experimentally manipulating elements of submitted application materials that suggest an applicant's demographic traits, such as their listed name. We apply this method to audit candidate assessments produced by several state-of-the-art LLMs, using a novel corpus of applications to K-12 teaching positions in a large public school district. We find evidence of moderate race and gender disparities, a pattern largely robust to varying the types of application material input to the models, as well as the framing of the task to the LLMs. We conclude by discussing some important limitations of correspondence experiments for auditing algorithms.

This paper explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of sustainable agricultural development across diverse regions in Africa. Delving into opportunities, challenges, and impact, the study navigates through the dynamic landscape of AI applications in agriculture. Opportunities such as precision farming, crop monitoring, and climate-resilient practices are examined, alongside challenges related to technological infrastructure, data accessibility, and skill gaps. The article analyzes the impact of AI on smallholder farmers, supply chains, and inclusive growth. Ethical considerations and policy implications are also discussed, offering insights into responsible AI integration. By providing a nuanced understanding, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on leveraging AI for fostering sustainability in African agriculture.

AI in Supply Chain Risk Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Md Abrar Jahin, Saleh Akram Naife, Anik Kumar Saha +1

Supply chain risk assessment (SCRA) is pivotal for ensuring resilience in increasingly complex global supply networks. While existing reviews have explored traditional methodologies, they often neglect emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications and mostly lack combined systematic and bibliometric analyses. This study addresses these gaps by integrating a systematic literature review with bibliometric analysis, examining 1,903 articles (2015-2025), with 54 studies selected through PRISMA guidelines. Our findings reveal that ML models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, and hybrid approaches, significantly improve risk prediction accuracy and adaptability in post-pandemic contexts. The bibliometric analysis identifies key trends, influential authors, and institutional contributions, highlighting China and the United States as leading research hubs. Practical insights emphasize the integration of explainable AI (XAI) for transparent decision-making, real-time data utilization, and blockchain for traceability. The study underscores the necessity of dynamic strategies, interdisciplinary collaboration, and continuous model evaluation to address challenges such as data quality and interpretability. By synthesizing AI-driven methodologies with resilience frameworks, this review provides actionable guidance for optimizing supply chain risk management, fostering adaptability, and informing future research in evolving risk landscapes.

This article reviews the landscape of ethical challenges of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into smart healthcare products, including medical electronic devices. Differences between traditional ethics in the medical domain and emerging ethical challenges with AI-driven healthcare are presented, particularly as they relate to transparency, bias, privacy, safety, responsibility, justice, and autonomy. Open challenges and recommendations are outlined to enable the integration of ethical principles into the design, validation, clinical trials, deployment, monitoring, repair, and retirement of AI-based smart healthcare products.

With the growing need to regulate AI systems across a wide variety of application domains, a new set of occupations has emerged in the industry. The so-called responsible AI practitioners or AI ethicists are generally tasked with interpreting and operationalizing best practices for ethical and safe design of AI systems. Due to the nascent nature of these roles, however, it is unclear to future employers and aspiring AI ethicists what specific function these roles serve and what skills are necessary to serve the functions. Without clarity on these, we cannot train future AI ethicists with meaningful learning objectives. In this work, we examine what responsible AI practitioners do in the industry and what skills they employ on the job. We propose an ontology of existing roles alongside skills and competencies that serve each role. We created this ontology by examining the job postings for such roles over a two-year period (2020-2022) and conducting expert interviews with fourteen individuals who currently hold such a role in the industry. Our ontology contributes to business leaders looking to build responsible AI teams and provides educators with a set of competencies that an AI ethics curriculum can prioritize.

Explainability is becoming an important requirement for organizations that make use of automated decision-making due to regulatory initiatives and a shift in public awareness. Various and significantly different algorithmic methods to provide this explainability have been introduced in the field, but the existing literature in the machine learning community has paid little attention to the stakeholder whose needs are rather studied in the human-computer interface community. Therefore, organizations that want or need to provide this explainability are confronted with the selection of an appropriate method for their use case. In this paper, we argue there is a need for a methodology to bridge the gap between stakeholder needs and explanation methods. We present our ongoing work on creating this methodology to help data scientists in the process of providing explainability to stakeholders. In particular, our contributions include documents used to characterize XAI methods and user requirements (shown in Appendix), which our methodology builds upon.

We perform a socio-computational interrogation of the google search by image algorithm, a main component of the google search engine. We audit the algorithm by presenting it with more than 40 thousands faces of all ages and more than four races and collecting and analyzing the assigned labels with the appropriate statistical tools. We find that the algorithm reproduces white male patriarchal structures, often simplifying, stereotyping and discriminating females and non-white individuals, while providing more diverse and positive descriptions of white men. By drawing from Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction, we link these results to the attitudes of the algorithm's designers, owners, and the dataset the algorithm was trained on. We further underpin the problematic nature of the algorithm by using the ethnographic practice of studying-up: We show how the algorithm places individuals at the top of the tech industry within the socio-cultural reality that they shaped, many times creating biased representations of them. We claim that the use of social-theoretic frameworks such as the above are able to contribute to improved algorithmic accountability, algorithmic impact assessment and provide additional and more critical depth in algorithmic bias and auditing studies. Based on the analysis, we discuss the scientific and design implications and provide suggestions for alternative ways to design just socioalgorithmic systems.

Explainable AI(XAI)is a domain focused on providing interpretability and explainability of a decision-making process. In the domain of law, in addition to system and data transparency, it also requires the (legal-) decision-model transparency and the ability to understand the models inner working when arriving at the decision. This paper provides the first approaches to using a popular image processing technique, Grad-CAM, to showcase the explainability concept for legal texts. With the help of adapted Grad-CAM metrics, we show the interplay between the choice of embeddings, its consideration of contextual information, and their effect on downstream processing.

An overview of 11 proposals for building safe advanced AI

Evan Hubinger

This paper analyzes and compares 11 different proposals for building safe advanced AI under the current machine learning paradigm, including major contenders such as iterated amplification, AI safety via debate, and recursive reward modeling. Each proposal is evaluated on the four components of outer alignment, inner alignment, training competitiveness, and performance competitiveness, of which the distinction between the latter two is introduced in this paper. While prior literature has primarily focused on analyzing individual proposals, or primarily focused on outer alignment at the expense of inner alignment, this analysis seeks to take a comparative look at a wide range of proposals including a comparative analysis across all four previously mentioned components.