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Science and technology for the explanation of AI decision making

Project description

Justifying AI decision making

Artificial intelligence’s (AI) Black Box combined with machine learning (ML) is widely being used in automated decision-making. It is helping to manage data and quickly process decisions but these automated decisions can involve biases from collected data or be unfair. Furthermore, they can’t be explained nor transparent, depriving clients of the right to an explanation. The EU-funded XAI project aims to produce meaningful explanations for AI/ML systems. The research focuses on how to design transparency in ML models, how to produce controlled black-box explanations, how to reveal used data and algorithms, unfairness and causal relationships in processes. The project will also formulate ethical and legal standards for AI.

Objective

A wealthy friend of mine asks for a vacation credit card to his bank, to discover that the credit he is offered is very low. The bank teller cannot explain why. My stubborn friend continues his quest for explanation up to the bank executives, to discover that an algorithm lowered his credit score. Why? After a long investigation, it turns out that the reason is: bad credit by the former owner of my friends house.

Black box AI systems for automated decision making, often based on ML over (big) data, map a users features into a class or a score without explaining why. This is problematic for lack of transparency, but also for possible biases inherited by the algorithms from human prejudices and collection artefacts hidden in the training data, which may lead to unfair or wrong decisions.

I strive for solutions of the urgent challenge of how to construct meaningful explanations of opaque AI/ML systems, introducing the local-to-global framework for black box explanation, articulated along 3 lines: a) the language for explanations in terms of expressive logic rules, with statistical and causal interpretation; b) the inference of local explanations for revealing the decision rationale for a specific case; c), the bottom-up generalization of many local explanations into simple global ones. An intertwined line of research will investigate both causal explanations, i.e. models that capture the causal relationships among the features and the decision, and mechanistic/physical models of complex system physics, that capture the data generation mechanism behind specific deep learning models.
I will also develop: an infrastructure for benchmarking, for the users' assessment of the explanations and the crowdsensing of observational decision data; an ethical-legal framework, for compliance and impact of our results on legal standards and on the right of explanation provisions of the GDPR; case studies in explanation-by-design, with a priority in health and fraud detection.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2018-ADG

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Host institution

SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 915 500,00
Address
PIAZZA DEI CAVALIERI 7
56126 PISA
Italy

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Region
Centro (IT) Toscana Pisa
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 915 500,00

Beneficiaries (3)

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