Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) - the practice of developing, evaluating, and maintaining accurate AI systems that also exhibit essential properties such as robustness and explainability - represents a multifaceted challenge that often stretches standard machine learning tooling, frameworks, and testing methods beyond their limits. In this paper, we present two new software libraries - hydra-zen and the rAI-toolbox - that address critical needs for responsible AI engineering. hydra-zen dramatically simplifies the process of making complex AI applications configurable, and their behaviors reproducible. The rAI-toolbox is designed to enable methods for evaluating and enhancing the robustness of AI-models in a way that is scalable and that composes naturally with other popular ML frameworks. We describe the design principles and methodologies that make these tools effective, including the use of property-based testing to bolster the reliability of the tools themselves. Finally, we demonstrate the composability and flexibility of the tools by showing how various use cases from adversarial robustness and explainable AI can be concisely implemented with familiar APIs.
Although AI is transforming the world, there are serious concerns about its ability to behave and make decisions responsibly. Many ethical regulations, principles, and frameworks for responsible AI have been issued recently. However, they are high level and difficult to put into practice. On the other hand, most AI researchers focus on algorithmic solutions, while the responsible AI challenges actually crosscut the entire engineering lifecycle and components of AI systems. To close the gap in operationalizing responsible AI, this paper aims to develop a roadmap on software engineering for resp…
Requirements Engineering (RE) is the discipline for identifying, analyzing, as well as ensuring the implementation and delivery of user, technical, and societal requirements. Recently reported issues concerning the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions after deployment, e.g. in the medical, automotive, or scientific domains, stress the importance of RE for designing and delivering Responsible AI systems. In this paper, we argue that RE should not only be carefully conducted but also tailored for Responsible AI. We outline related challenges for research and practice.
The recent release of ChatGPT has gained huge attention and discussion worldwide, with responsible AI being a key topic of discussion. How can we ensure that AI systems, including ChatGPT, are developed and adopted in a responsible way? To tackle the responsible AI challenges, various ethical principles have been released by governments, organisations, and companies. However, those principles are very abstract and not practical enough. Further, significant efforts have been put on algorithm-level solutions that only address a narrow set of principles, such as fairness and privacy. To fill the …
Although artificial intelligence (AI) is solving real-world challenges and transforming industries, there are serious concerns about its ability to behave and make decisions in a responsible way. Many AI ethics principles and guidelines for responsible AI have been recently issued by governments, organisations, and enterprises. However, these AI ethics principles and guidelines are typically high-level and do not provide concrete guidance on how to design and develop responsible AI systems. To address this shortcoming, we first present an empirical study where we interviewed 21 scientists and …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Accenture（埃森哲）；De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
Companies have considered adoption of various high-level artificial intelligence (AI) principles for responsible AI, but there is less clarity on how to implement these principles as organizational practices. This paper reviews the principles-to-practices gap. We outline five explanations for this gap ranging from a disciplinary divide to an overabundance of tools. In turn, we argue that an impact assessment framework which is broad, operationalizable, flexible, iterative, guided, and participatory is a promising approach to close the principles-to-practices gap. Finally, to help practitioners…
The impact of Artificial Intelligence does not depend only on fundamental research and technological developments, but for a large part on how these systems are introduced into society and used in everyday situations. AI is changing the way we work, live and solve challenges but concerns about fairness, transparency or privacy are also growing. Ensuring responsible, ethical AI is more than designing systems whose result can be trusted. It is about the way we design them, why we design them, and who is involved in designing them. In order to develop and use AI responsibly, we need to work towar…
Framework, Standards, Applications and Best practices of Responsible AI : A Comprehensive Survey
College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Zhejiang A&F University（浙江农林大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）；School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering and Computing Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学工程与计算学院计算机学院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Northumbria University（诺森比亚大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳北理莫斯科大学人工智能研究院）；School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学医学技术学院）
Although AI has significant potential to transform society, there are serious concerns about its ability to behave and make decisions responsibly. Many ethical regulations, principles, and guidelines for responsible AI have been issued recently. However, these principles are high-level and difficult to put into practice. In the meantime much effort has been put into responsible AI from the algorithm perspective, but they are limited to a small subset of ethical principles amenable to mathematical analysis. Responsible AI issues go beyond data and algorithms and are often at the system-level cr…
Montreal AI Ethics Institute（蒙特利尔人工智能伦理研究所）；Microsoft（微软）
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 p…
The irresponsible use of ML algorithms in practical settings has received a lot of deserved attention in the recent years. We posit that the traditional system analysis perspective is needed when designing and implementing ML algorithms and systems. Such perspective can provide a formal way for evaluating and enabling responsible ML practices. In this paper, we review components of the System Analysis methodology and highlight how they connect and enable responsible practices of ML design.
In the last couple of years we have witnessed an enormous increase of machine learning (ML) applications. More and more program functions are no longer written in code, but learnt from a huge amount of data samples using an ML algorithm. However, what is often overlooked is the complexity of managing the resulting ML models as well as bringing these into a real production system. In software engineering, we have spent decades on developing tools and methodologies to create, manage and assemble complex software modules. We present an overview of current techniques to manage complex software, an…
Data scientists often develop machine learning models to solve a variety of problems in the industry and academy but not without facing several challenges in terms of Model Development. The problems regarding Machine Learning Development involves the fact that such professionals do not realize that they usually perform ad-hoc practices that could be improved by the adoption of activities presented in the Software Engineering Development Lifecycle. Of course, since machine learning systems are different from traditional Software systems, some differences in their respective development processe…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Google（谷歌公司）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Naval Postgraduate School（海军研究生院）
Inappropriate design and deployment of machine learning (ML) systems leads to negative downstream social and ethical impact -- described here as social and ethical risks -- for users, society and the environment. Despite the growing need to regulate ML systems, current processes for assessing and mitigating risks are disjointed and inconsistent. We interviewed 30 industry practitioners on their current social and ethical risk management practices, and collected their first reactions on adapting safety engineering frameworks into their practice -- namely, System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA…
Practitioners from diverse occupations and backgrounds are increasingly using machine learning (ML) methods. Nonetheless, studies on ML Practitioners typically draw populations from Big Tech and academia, as researchers have easier access to these communities. Through this selection bias, past research often excludes the broader, lesser-resourced ML community -- for example, practitioners working at startups, at non-tech companies, and in the public sector. These practitioners share many of the same ML development difficulties and ethical conundrums as their Big Tech counterparts; however, the…
Rising concern for the societal implications of artificial intelligence systems has inspired demands for greater transparency and accountability. However the datasets which empower machine learning are often used, shared and re-used with little visibility into the processes of deliberation which led to their creation. Which stakeholder groups had their perspectives included when the dataset was conceived? Which domain experts were consulted regarding how to model subgroups and other phenomena? How were questions of representational biases measured and addressed? Who labeled the data? In this p…
Engineering Carbon Credits Towards A Responsible FinTech Era: The Practices, Implications, and Future
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Adelaide Business School（阿德莱德商学院）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；University of New South Wales Sydney（新南威尔士大学悉尼分校）；The University of Sydney Business School（悉尼大学商学院）
Machine-learning (ML) techniques have become popular in the recent years. ML techniques rely on mathematics and on software engineering. Researchers and practitioners studying best practices for designing ML application systems and software to address the software complexity and quality of ML techniques. Such design practices are often formalized as architecture patterns and design patterns by encapsulating reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems within given contexts. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no work collecting, classifying, and discussing these software…
The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project aims to broaden understanding of the social, historical, cultural, political, and economic forces that contribute to discrimination and inequity in contemporary ecologies of data collection, governance, and use. This is the consultation draft of a guide for developers and organisations, which are producing, procuring, or using data-intensive technologies.In the first section, we introduce the field of data justice, from its early discussions to more recent proposals to relocate understandings of what data justice means. This section incl…
Prompt engineering paradigms for medical applications: scoping review and recommendations for better practices
Geneva University Hospitals（日内瓦大学医院）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Université Sorbonne Paris-Nord（索邦巴黎北大学）
