Research Papers

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.

Cyber Sentinel: Exploring Conversational Agents in Streamlining Security Tasks with GPT-4

Mehrdad Kaheh, Danial Khosh Kholgh, Panos Kostakos

In an era where cyberspace is both a battleground and a backbone of modern society, the urgency of safeguarding digital assets against ever-evolving threats is paramount. This paper introduces Cyber Sentinel, an innovative task-oriented cybersecurity dialogue system that is effectively capable of managing two core functions: explaining potential cyber threats within an organization to the user, and taking proactive/reactive security actions when instructed by the user. Cyber Sentinel embodies the fusion of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity domain expertise, and real-time data analysis to combat the multifaceted challenges posed by cyber adversaries. This article delves into the process of creating such a system and how it can interact with other components typically found in cybersecurity organizations. Our work is a novel approach to task-oriented dialogue systems, leveraging the power of chaining GPT-4 models combined with prompt engineering across all sub-tasks. We also highlight its pivotal role in enhancing cybersecurity communication and interaction, concluding that not only does this framework enhance the system's transparency (Explainable AI) but also streamlines the decision-making process and responding to threats (Actionable AI), therefore marking a significant advancement in the realm of cybersecurity communication.

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.

Pervasive technologies combined with powerful AI have been recently introduced to enhance work productivity. Yet, some of these technologies are judged to be invasive. To identify which ones, we should understand how employees tend to judge these technologies. We considered 16 technologies that track productivity, and conducted a study in which 131 crowd-workers judged these scenarios. We found that a technology was judged to be right depending on the following three aspects of increasing importance. That is, whether the technology: 1) was currently supported by existing tools; 2) did not interfere with work or was fit for purpose; and 3) did not cause any harm or did not infringe on any individual rights. Ubicomp research currently focuses on how to design better technologies by making them more accurate, or by increasingly blending them into the background. It might be time to design better ubiquitous technologies by unpacking AI ethics as well.

Contemporary DNN testing works are frequently conducted using metamorphic testing (MT). In general, de facto MT frameworks mutate DNN input images using semantics-preserving mutations and determine if DNNs can yield consistent predictions. Nevertheless, we find that DNNs may rely on erroneous decisions (certain components on the DNN inputs) to make predictions, which may still retain the outputs by chance. Such DNN defects would be neglected by existing MT frameworks. Erroneous decisions, however, would likely result in successive mis-predictions over diverse images that may exist in real-life scenarios. This research aims to unveil the pervasiveness of hidden DNN defects caused by incorrect DNN decisions (but retaining consistent DNN predictions). To do so, we tailor and optimize modern eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to identify visual concepts that represent regions in an input image upon which the DNN makes predictions. Then, we extend existing MT-based DNN testing frameworks to check the consistency of DNN decisions made over a test input and its mutated inputs. Our evaluation shows that existing MT frameworks are oblivious to a considerable number of DNN defects caused by erroneous decisions. We conduct human evaluations to justify the validity of our findings and to elucidate their characteristics. Through the lens of DNN decision-based metamorphic relations, we re-examine the effectiveness of metamorphic transformations proposed by existing MT frameworks. We summarize lessons from this study, which can provide insights and guidelines for future DNN testing.

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.

Diagnosing AI Explanation Methods with Folk Concepts of Behavior

Alon Jacovi, Jasmijn Bastings, Sebastian Gehrmann +2

We investigate a formalism for the conditions of a successful explanation of AI. We consider "success" to depend not only on what information the explanation contains, but also on what information the human explainee understands from it. Theory of mind literature discusses the folk concepts that humans use to understand and generalize behavior. We posit that folk concepts of behavior provide us with a "language" that humans understand behavior with. We use these folk concepts as a framework of social attribution by the human explainee - the information constructs that humans are likely to comprehend from explanations - by introducing a blueprint for an explanatory narrative (Figure 1) that explains AI behavior with these constructs. We then demonstrate that many XAI methods today can be mapped to folk concepts of behavior in a qualitative evaluation. This allows us to uncover their failure modes that prevent current methods from explaining successfully - i.e., the information constructs that are missing for any given XAI method, and whose inclusion can decrease the likelihood of misunderstanding AI behavior.

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.

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in Boolean function in explaining binary classifiers in the field of explainable AI (XAI). The standard approach of Boolean function is propositional logic. We present a modal language of a ceteris paribus nature which supports reasoning about binary input classifiers and their properties. We study a family of classifier models, axiomatize it as two proof systems regarding the cardinality of the language and show completeness of our axiomatics. Moreover, we prove that satisfiability checking problem for our modal language is NEXPTIME-complete in the infinite-variable case, while it becomes polynomial in the finite-variable case. We furthermore identify an interesting NP fragment of our language in the infinite-variable case. We leverage the language to formalize counterfactual conditional as well as a variety of notions of explanation including abductive, contrastive and counterfactual explanations, and biases. Finally, we present two extensions of our language: a dynamic extension by the notion of assignment enabling classifier change and an epistemic extension in which the classifier's uncertainty about the actual input can be represented.

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.