Research Papers

While predictive policing has become increasingly common in assisting with decisions in the criminal justice system, the use of these results is still controversial. Some software based on deep learning lacks accuracy (e.g., in F-1), and importantly many decision processes are not transparent, causing doubt about decision bias, such as perceived racial and age disparities. This paper addresses bias issues with post-hoc explanations to provide a trustable prediction of whether a person will receive future criminal charges given one's previous criminal records by learning temporal behavior patterns over twenty years. Bi-LSTM relieves the vanishing gradient problem, attentional mechanisms allow learning and interpretation of feature importance, and complex-valued networks inspired quantum physics to facilitate a certain level of transparency in modeling the decision process. Our approach shows a consistent and reliable prediction precision and recall on a real-life dataset. Our analysis of the importance of each input feature shows the critical causal impact on decision-making, suggesting that criminal histories are statistically significant factors, while identifiers, such as race and age, are not. Finally, our algorithm indicates that a suspect tends to rather than suddenly increase crime severity level over time gradually.

Understanding peacefulness through the world news

Vasiliki Voukelatou, Ioanna Miliou, Fosca Giannotti +1

Peacefulness is a principal dimension of well-being and is the way out of inequity and violence. Thus, its measurement has drawn the attention of researchers, policymakers, and peacekeepers. During the last years, novel digital data streams have drastically changed the research in this field. The current study exploits information extracted from a new digital database called Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) to capture peacefulness through the Global Peace Index (GPI). Applying predictive machine learning models, we demonstrate that news media attention from GDELT can be used as a proxy for measuring GPI at a monthly level. Additionally, we use explainable AI techniques to obtain the most important variables that drive the predictions. This analysis highlights each country's profile and provides explanations for the predictions, and particularly for the errors and the events that drive these errors. We believe that digital data exploited by researchers, policymakers, and peacekeepers, with data science tools as powerful as machine learning, could contribute to maximizing the societal benefits and minimizing the risks to peacefulness.

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to inform critical decisions. There is a growing concern about bias, that algorithms may produce uneven outcomes for individuals in different demographic groups. In this work, we measure bias as the difference between mean prediction errors across groups. We show that even with unbiased input data, when a model is mis-specified: (1) population-level mean prediction error can still be negligible, but group-level mean prediction errors can be large; (2) such errors are not equal across groups; and (3) the difference between errors, i.e., bias, can take the worst-case realization. That is, when there are two groups of the same size, mean prediction errors for these two groups have the same magnitude but opposite signs. In closed form, we show such errors and bias are functions of the first and second moments of the joint distribution of features (for linear and probit regressions). We also conduct numerical experiments to show similar results in more general settings. Our work provides a first step for decoupling the impact of different causes of bias.

The 4th edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in the field of AI Ethics since January 2021. This report aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the ever-changing developments in the field. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, with a particular focus on four key themes: Ethical AI, Fairness & Justice, Humans & Tech, and Privacy. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. Opening the report is a long-form piece by Edward Higgs (Professor of History, University of Essex) titled "AI and the Face: A Historian's View." In it, Higgs examines the unscientific history of facial analysis and how AI might be repeating some of those mistakes at scale. The report also features chapter introductions by Alexa Hagerty (Anthropologist, University of Cambridge), Marianna Ganapini (Faculty Director, Montreal AI Ethics Institute), Deborah G. Johnson (Emeritus Professor, Engineering and Society, University of Virginia), and Soraj Hongladarom (Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok). This report should be used not only as a point of reference and insight on the latest thinking in the field of AI Ethics, but should also be used as a tool for introspection as we aim to foster a more nuanced conversation regarding the impacts of AI on the world.

This report prepared by the Montreal AI Ethics Institute provides recommendations in response to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) Key Considerations for Responsible Development and Fielding of Artificial Intelligence document. The report centres on the idea that Responsible AI should be made the Norm rather than an Exception. It does so by utilizing the guiding principles of: (1) alleviating friction in existing workflows, (2) empowering stakeholders to get buy-in, and (3) conducting an effective translation of abstract standards into actionable engineering practices. After providing some overarching comments on the document from the NSCAI, the report dives into the primary contribution of an actionable framework to help operationalize the ideas presented in the document from the NSCAI. The framework consists of: (1) a learning, knowledge, and information exchange (LKIE), (2) the Three Ways of Responsible AI, (3) an empirically-driven risk-prioritization matrix, and (4) achieving the right level of complexity. All components reinforce each other to move from principles to practice in service of making Responsible AI the norm rather than the exception.

Explainable components in XAI algorithms often come from a familiar set of models, such as linear models or decision trees. We formulate an approach where the type of explanation produced is guided by a specification. Specifications are elicited from the user, possibly using interaction with the user and contributions from other areas. Areas where a specification could be obtained include forensic, medical, and scientific applications. Providing a menu of possible types of specifications in an area is an exploratory knowledge representation and reasoning task for the algorithm designer, aiming at understanding the possibilities and limitations of efficiently computable modes of explanations. Two examples are discussed: explanations for Bayesian networks using the theory of argumentation, and explanations for graph neural networks. The latter case illustrates the possibility of having a representation formalism available to the user for specifying the type of explanation requested, for example, a chemical query language for classifying molecules. The approach is motivated by a theory of explanation in the philosophy of science, and it is related to current questions in the philosophy of science on the role of machine learning.

This work documents a pilot user study evaluating the effectiveness of contrastive, causal and example explanations in supporting human understanding of AI in a hypothetical commonplace human robot interaction HRI scenario. In doing so, this work situates explainable AI XAI in the context of the social sciences and suggests that HRI explanations are improved when informed by the social sciences.

Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some interesting insights into how to cope and tackle these changes in our Western society and other areas of the world. It can be challenging for social science practitioners to grasp and keep up with the pace of technological innovation, with many being unfamiliar with the jargon of AI. This short guide serves as both an introduction to AI ethics and social science and anthropological perspectives on the development of AI. It intends to provide those unfamiliar with the field with an insight into the societal impact of AI systems and how, in turn, these systems can lead us to rethink how our world operates.

Value alignment has emerged in recent years as a basic principle to produce beneficial and mindful Artificial Intelligence systems. It mainly states that autonomous entities should behave in a way that is aligned with our human values. In this work, we summarize a previously developed model that considers values as preferences over states of the world and defines alignment between the governing norms and the values. We provide a use-case for this framework with the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma model, which we use to exemplify the definitions we review. We take advantage of this use-case to introduce new concepts to be integrated with the established framework: alignment equilibrium and Pareto optimal alignment. These are inspired on the classical Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimality, but are designed to account for any value we wish to model in the system.

Response by the Montreal AI Ethics Institute to the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Online Content Moderation

Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini, Camylle Lanteigne, Abhishek Gupta

In April 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) publicly called for comments on expanding and improving the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability (SCP), originally published in May 2018. The Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) responded to this call by drafting a set of recommendations based on insights and analysis by the MAIEI staff and supplemented by workshop contributions from the AI Ethics community convened during two online public consultation workshops. In its submission, MAIEI provides 12 overarching recommendations for the SCP, these include: 1) ensure there is more diversity in the content moderation process; 2) increase transparency into how platforms guide content-ranking; 3) disclose anonymized data on the training and/or cultural background of the content moderators for a platform; 4) tailor content moderation tools for specific issues; 5) draft specific guidelines for messaging applications with regards to data protection in content moderation; 6) take into account cultural differences relevant to what constitutes acceptable behavior online; 7) ensure platforms are transparent in regards to political advertising; 8) ensure greater transparency into the user-generated flagging/reporting systems deployed by a platform; 9) clarify if user content is flagged or reported through an automated system; 10) provide more data on the types of content removed from platforms; 11) provide clear guidelines on the appeal process, as well as data on prior appeals; 12) create a system for periodically revisiting the SCP so it reflects various technological advancements, modifications in law and policy, as well as changing trends or movements in content moderation.

Pruning coupled with learning, ensembles of minimal neural networks, and future of XAI

Alexander N. Gorban, Evgeny M. Mirkes

Pruning coupled with learning aims to optimize the neural network (NN) structure for solving specific problems. This optimization can be used for various purposes: to prevent overfitting, to save resources for implementation and training, to provide explainability of the trained NN, and many others. The minimal structure that cannot be pruned further is not unique. Ensemble of minimal structures can be used as a committee of intellectual agents that solves problems by voting. Each minimal NN presents an "empirical knowledge" about the problem and can be verbalized. The non-uniqueness of such knowledge extracted from data is an important property of data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this work, we review an approach to pruning based on the principle: What controls training should control pruning. This principle is expected to work both for artificial NN and for selection and modification of important synaptic contacts in brain. In back-propagation artificial NN learning is controlled by the gradient of loss functions. Therefore, the first order sensitivity indicators are used for pruning and the algorithms based on these indicators are reviewed. The notion of logically transparent NN was introduced. The approach was illustrated on the problem of political forecasting: predicting the results of the US presidential election. Eight minimal NN were produced that give different forecasting algorithms. The non-uniqueness of solution can be utilised by creation of expert panels (committee). Another use of NN pluralism is to identify areas of input signals where further data collection is most useful. In Conclusion, we discuss the possible future of widely advertised XAI program.

Recently, a lot of attention has been given to undesired consequences of Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as unfair bias leading to discrimination, or the lack of explanations of the results of AI systems. There are several important questions to answer before AI can be deployed at scale in our businesses and societies. Most of these issues are being discussed by experts and the wider communities, and it seems there is broad consensus on where they come from. There is, however, less consensus on, and experience with how to practically deal with those issues in organizations that develop and use AI, both from a technical and organizational perspective. In this paper, we discuss the practical case of a large organization that is putting in place a company-wide methodology to minimize the risk of undesired consequences of AI. We hope that other organizations can learn from this and that our experience contributes to making the best of AI while minimizing its risks.