Research Papers

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress in recent years, yet its rapid expansion brings overlooked environmental and ethical challenges. This review explores four critical areas where AI's impact extends beyond performance: energy consumption, electronic waste (e-waste), inequality in compute access, and the hidden energy burden of cybersecurity systems. Drawing from recent studies and institutional reports, the paper highlights systemic issues such as high emissions from model training, rising hardware turnover, global infrastructure disparities, and the energy demands of securing AI. By connecting these concerns, the review contributes to Responsible AI discourse by identifying key research gaps and advocating for sustainable, transparent, and equitable development practices. Ultimately, it argues that AI's progress must align with ethical responsibility and environmental stewardship to ensure a more inclusive and sustainable technological future.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems based on deep learning have achieved impressive performance in recent years. However, these models often exhibit demographic biases, particularly with respect to age, which can compromise their fairness and reliability. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of age-related bias in deep FER models, with a particular focus on the elderly population. We first investigate whether recognition performance varies across age groups, which expressions are most affected, and whether model attention differs depending on age. Using Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, we identify systematic disparities in expression recognition and attention patterns, especially for "neutral", "sadness", and "anger" in elderly individuals. Based on these findings, we propose and evaluate three bias mitigation strategies: Multi-task Learning, Multi-modal Input, and Age-weighted Loss. Our models are trained on a large-scale dataset, AffectNet, with automatically estimated age labels and validated on balanced benchmark datasets that include underrepresented age groups. Results show consistent improvements in recognition accuracy for elderly individuals, particularly for the most error-prone expressions. Saliency heatmap analysis reveals that models trained with age-aware strategies attend to more relevant facial regions for each age group, helping to explain the observed improvements. These findings suggest that age-related bias in FER can be effectively mitigated using simple training modifications, and that even approximate demographic labels can be valuable for promoting fairness in large-scale affective computing systems.

This work presents a novel course titled The World of AI designed for first-year undergraduate engineering students with little to no prior exposure to AI. The central problem addressed by this course is that engineering students often lack foundational knowledge of AI and its broader societal implications at the outset of their academic journeys. We believe the way to address this gap is to design and deliver an interdisciplinary course that can a) be accessed by first-year undergraduate engineering students across any domain, b) enable them to understand the basic workings of AI systems sans mathematics, and c) make them appreciate AI's far-reaching implications on our lives. The course was divided into three modules co-delivered by faculty from both engineering and humanities. The planetary module explored AI's dual role as both a catalyst for sustainability and a contributor to environmental challenges. The societal impact module focused on AI biases and concerns around privacy and fairness. Lastly, the workplace module highlighted AI-driven job displacement, emphasizing the importance of adaptation. The novelty of this course lies in its interdisciplinary curriculum design and pedagogical approach, which combines technical instruction with societal discourse. Results revealed that students' comprehension of AI challenges improved across diverse metrics like (a) increased awareness of AI's environmental impact, and (b) efficient corrective solutions for AI fairness. Furthermore, it also indicated the evolution in students' perception of AI's transformative impact on our lives.

Speech impairments are prevalent biomarkers for Parkinson's Disease (PD), motivating the development of diagnostic techniques using speech data for clinical applications. Although deep acoustic features have shown promise for PD classification, their effectiveness often varies due to individual speaker differences, a factor that has not been thoroughly explored in the existing literature. This study investigates the effectiveness of three pre-trained audio embeddings (OpenL3, VGGish and Wav2Vec2.0 models) for PD classification. Using the NeuroVoz dataset, OpenL3 outperforms others in diadochokinesis (DDK) and listen and repeat (LR) tasks, capturing critical acoustic features for PD detection. Only Wav2Vec2.0 shows significant gender bias, achieving more favorable results for male speakers, in DDK tasks. The misclassified cases reveal challenges with atypical speech patterns, highlighting the need for improved feature extraction and model robustness in PD detection.

We present a study on how and where personas -- defined by distinct sets of human characteristics, values, and beliefs -- are encoded in the representation space of large language models (LLMs). Using a range of dimension reduction and pattern recognition methods, we first identify the model layers that show the greatest divergence in encoding these representations. We then analyze the activations within a selected layer to examine how specific personas are encoded relative to others, including their shared and distinct embedding spaces. We find that, across multiple pre-trained decoder-only LLMs, the analyzed personas show large differences in representation space only within the final third of the decoder layers. We observe overlapping activations for specific ethical perspectives -- such as moral nihilism and utilitarianism -- suggesting a degree of polysemy. In contrast, political ideologies like conservatism and liberalism appear to be represented in more distinct regions. These findings help to improve our understanding of how LLMs internally represent information and can inform future efforts in refining the modulation of specific human traits in LLM outputs. Warning: This paper includes potentially offensive sample statements.

Bridging Distribution Shift and AI Safety: Conceptual and Methodological Synergies

Chenruo Liu, Kenan Tang, Yao Qin +1

This paper bridges distribution shift and AI safety through a comprehensive analysis of their conceptual and methodological synergies. While prior discussions often focus on narrow cases or informal analogies, we establish two types connections between specific causes of distribution shift and fine-grained AI safety issues: (1) methods addressing a specific shift type can help achieve corresponding safety goals, or (2) certain shifts and safety issues can be formally reduced to each other, enabling mutual adaptation of their methods. Our findings provide a unified perspective that encourages deeper integration between distribution shift and AI safety research.

Although the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday tasks improves efficiency and objectivity, it also risks transmitting bias to human decision-making. In this study, we conducted a controlled experiment that simulated hiring decisions to examine how biased AI recommendations - augmented with or without counterfactual explanations - influence human judgment over time. Participants, acting as hiring managers, completed 60 decision trials divided into a baseline phase without AI, followed by a phase with biased (X)AI recommendations (favoring either male or female candidates), and a final post-interaction phase without AI. Our results indicate that the participants followed the AI recommendations 70% of the time when the qualifications of the given candidates were comparable. Yet, only a fraction of participants detected the gender bias (8 out of 294). Crucially, exposure to biased AI altered participants' inherent preferences: in the post-interaction phase, participants' independent decisions aligned with the bias when no counterfactual explanations were provided before, but reversed the bias when explanations were given. Reported trust did not differ significantly across conditions. Confidence varied throughout the study phases after exposure to male-biased AI, indicating nuanced effects of AI bias on decision certainty. Our findings point to the importance of calibrating XAI to avoid unintended behavioral shifts in order to safeguard equitable decision-making and prevent the adoption of algorithmic bias.

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare service industry presents numerous ethical challenges, yet current frameworks often fail to offer a comprehensive, empirical understanding of the multidimensional factors influencing ethical AI integration. Addressing this critical research gap, this study introduces the Multi-Dimensional Ethical AI Adoption Model (MEAAM), a novel theoretical framework that categorizes 13 critical ethical variables across four foundational dimensions of Ethical AI Fair AI, Responsible AI, Explainable AI, and Sustainable AI. These dimensions are further analyzed through three core ethical lenses: epistemic concerns (related to knowledge, transparency, and system trustworthiness), normative concerns (focused on justice, autonomy, dignity, and moral obligations), and overarching concerns (highlighting global, systemic, and long-term ethical implications). This study adopts a quantitative, cross-sectional research design using survey data collected from healthcare professionals and analyzed via Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Employing PLS-SEM, this study empirically investigates the influence of these ethical constructs on two outcomes Operational AI Adoption and Systemic AI Adoption. Results indicate that normative concerns most significantly drive operational adoption decisions, while overarching concerns predominantly shape systemic adoption strategies and governance frameworks. Epistemic concerns play a facilitative role, enhancing the impact of ethical design principles on trust and transparency in AI systems. By validating the MEAAM framework, this research advances a holistic, actionable approach to ethical AI adoption in healthcare and provides critical insights for policymakers, technologists, and healthcare administrators striving to implement ethically grounded AI solutions.

Fairness auditing of AI systems can identify and quantify biases. However, traditional auditing using real-world data raises security and privacy concerns. It exposes auditors to security risks as they become custodians of sensitive information and targets for cyberattacks. Privacy risks arise even without direct breaches, as data analyses can inadvertently expose confidential information. To address these, we propose a framework that leverages differentially private synthetic data to audit the fairness of AI systems. By applying privacy-preserving mechanisms, it generates synthetic data that mirrors the statistical properties of the original dataset while ensuring privacy. This method balances the goal of rigorous fairness auditing and the need for strong privacy protections. Through experiments on real datasets like Adult, COMPAS, and Diabetes, we compare fairness metrics of synthetic and real data. By analyzing the alignment and discrepancies between these metrics, we assess the capacity of synthetic data to preserve the fairness properties of real data. Our results demonstrate the framework's ability to enable meaningful fairness evaluations while safeguarding sensitive information, proving its applicability across critical and sensitive domains.

Machine learning (ML) systems for medical imaging have demonstrated remarkable diagnostic capabilities, but their susceptibility to biases poses significant risks, since biases may negatively impact generalization performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel statistical framework to evaluate the dependency of medical imaging ML models on sensitive attributes, such as demographics. Our method leverages the concept of counterfactual invariance, measuring the extent to which a model's predictions remain unchanged under hypothetical changes to sensitive attributes. We present a practical algorithm that combines conditional latent diffusion models with statistical hypothesis testing to identify and quantify such biases without requiring direct access to counterfactual data. Through experiments on synthetic datasets and large-scale real-world medical imaging datasets, including \textsc{cheXpert} and MIMIC-CXR, we demonstrate that our approach aligns closely with counterfactual fairness principles and outperforms standard baselines. This work provides a robust tool to ensure that ML diagnostic systems generalize well, e.g., across demographic groups, offering a critical step towards AI safety in healthcare. Code: https://github.com/Neferpitou3871/AI-Alignment-Medical-Imaging.

This study investigates the extent to which Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) capture first language (L1) transfer in extended second language (L2) English speech. Speech samples from Mandarin and American English L1 speakers were extracted from the GMU Speech Accent Archive, converted to WAV format, and processed to obtain thirteen MFCCs per speaker. A multi-method analytic framework combining inferential statistics (t-tests, MANOVA, Canonical Discriminant Analysis) and machine learning (Random Forest classification) identified MFCC-1 (broadband energy), MFCC-2 (first formant region), and MFCC-5 (voicing and fricative energy) as the most discriminative features for distinguishing L1 backgrounds. A reduced-feature model using these MFCCs significantly outperformed the full-feature model, as confirmed by McNemar's test and non-overlapping confidence intervals. The findings empirically support the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 (PAM-L2) and the Speech Learning Model (SLM), demonstrating that L1-conditioned variation in L2 speech is both perceptually grounded and acoustically quantifiable. Methodologically, the study contributes to applied linguistics and explainable AI by proposing a transparent, data-efficient pipeline for L2 pronunciation modeling. The results also offer pedagogical implications for ESL/EFL instruction by highlighting L1-specific features that can inform intelligibility-oriented instruction, curriculum design, and speech assessment tools.

Counterfactual explanations are a widely used approach in Explainable AI, offering actionable insights into decision-making by illustrating how small changes to input data can lead to different outcomes. Despite their importance, evaluating the quality of counterfactual explanations remains an open problem. Traditional quantitative metrics, such as sparsity or proximity, fail to fully account for human preferences in explanations, while user studies are insightful but not scalable. Moreover, relying only on a single overall satisfaction rating does not lead to a nuanced understanding of why certain explanations are effective or not. To address this, we analyze a dataset of counterfactual explanations that were evaluated by 206 human participants, who rated not only overall satisfaction but also seven explanatory criteria: feasibility, coherence, complexity, understandability, completeness, fairness, and trust. Modeling overall satisfaction as a function of these criteria, we find that feasibility (the actionability of suggested changes) and trust (the belief that the changes would lead to the desired outcome) consistently stand out as the strongest predictors of user satisfaction, though completeness also emerges as a meaningful contributor. Crucially, even excluding feasibility and trust, other metrics explain 58% of the variance, highlighting the importance of additional explanatory qualities. Complexity appears independent, suggesting more detailed explanations do not necessarily reduce satisfaction. Strong metric correlations imply a latent structure in how users judge quality, and demographic background significantly shapes ranking patterns. These insights inform the design of counterfactual algorithms that adapt explanatory qualities to user expertise and domain context.