AI for the Common Good?! Pitfalls, challenges, and Ethics Pen-Testing

Recently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research visions that involve doing AI for "Good". This is part of a general drive towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good for all, or: contribute to the Common Good. But what is the Common Good, and is it enough to want to be good? Via four lead questions, I will illustrate challenges and pitfalls when determining, from an AI point of view, what the Common Good is and how it can be enhanced by AI. The questions are: What is the problem / What is a problem?, Who defines the problem?, What is the role of knowledge?, and What are important side effects and dynamics? The illustration will use an example from the domain of "AI for Social Good", more specifically "Data Science for Social Good". Even if the importance of these questions may be known at an abstract level, they do not get asked sufficiently in practice, as shown by an exploratory study of 99 contributions to recent conferences in the field. Turning these challenges and pitfalls into a positive recommendation, as a conclusion I will draw on another characteristic of computer-science thinking and practice to make these impediments visible and attenuate them: "attacks" as a method for improving design. This results in the proposal of ethics pen-testing as a method for helping AI designs to better contribute to the Common Good.Comment: to appear in Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics; accepted on 27-10-201

A qualitative study of stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment

Over two billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents which deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data mining and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment in order to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to three key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardised semi-structured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify three main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users' perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development and existing software agents enhancement

Corporate Influence in the Post-2015 Process

This working paper examines the role and influence of business actors in the process towards the Post-2015 agenda of the UN, with particular attention to the influence of large transnational corporations. The business sector certainly has an important role to play in the implementation process of the Post-2015 agenda, as sustainable development will require large-scale changes in business practices. Some pioneering companies are already on the path towards sustainable development solutions (for instance in the area of renewable energies). However, acknowledging corporations' role must not mean giving them undue influence on policymaking and ignoring their responsibility in creating and exacerbating many of the problems that the Post-2015 agenda is supposed to tackle.This working paper starts with a brief overview of the current process towards the Post-2015 agenda and assesses its political relevance. The second part maps out the key business players involved in various processes surrounding the post-2015 consultations. The third part of the paper analyzes the key messages and policy recommendations of business actors in the post-2015 process. The fourth part explores the problems, risks and side-effects of the corporate influence on the Post-2015 agenda. They relate, on the one hand, to the key messages, on the other hand to the promoted governance models. The final part draws some conclusions, provides policy recommendations for the UN, member states, civil society and academia, and highlights potential paths for future research and policy work

Environmental Justice in India: The National Green Tribunal and Expert Members

This article argues that the involvement of technical experts in decision making promotes better environmental results while simultaneously recognizing the uncertainty in science. India’s record as a progressive jurisdiction in environmental matters through its proactive judiciary is internationally recognized. The neoteric National Green Tribunal of India (NGT) – officially described as a ‘specialised body equipped with necessary expertise to handle environmental disputes involving multi-disciplinary issues’ – is a forum which offers greater plurality for environmental justice. The NGT, in exercising wide powers, is staffed by judicial and technical expert members who decide cases in an open forum. The experts are ‘central’, rather than ‘marginal’, to the NGT’s decision-making process. This article draws on theoretical insights developed by Lorna Schrefler and Peter Haas to analyze the role of scientific experts as decision makers within the NGT. Unprecedented interview access provides data that grants an insight into the internal decision-making processes of the five benches of the NGT. Reported cases, supported by additional comments of bench members, illustrate the wider policy impact of scientific knowledge and its contribution to the NGT’s decision-making process

Responsible Research and Innovation: Using the Requirements Tool for Stakeholder Engagement in Developing a Universal Design for Learning Guidelines for Practice

open access articleResponsible research and innovation (RRI) is growing in importance, and alongside this growth is an acknowledgement that for research and innovation projects to be successful, stakeholders must be involved from the outset. When developing guidelines for practice, stakeholders will often be presented with a document to ratify rather than one to develop or revise. This gap in stakeholder engagement has been recognised and addressed by the development of the requirements tool. This tool was originally created to provide a systematic approach to the development of guidelines for the governance of RRI, but it was quickly recognised that the tool can bridge the gap and involve stakeholders from the outset, thereby increasing the likelihood of buy-in. This paper presents the second validated use of the tool that was used to inform the revision of guidelines for the introduction of a universal design for learning (UDL) at a UK University. The resulting revised guidelines for practice and their adoption by those tasked with producing them provide further evidence of the value and flexibility of the tool and its potential for its continued use in the future development or revision of guidelines

Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.Comment: Sainyam Galhotra, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou. 2017. Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Paderborn, Germany, September 4-8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE'17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3106277, ESEC/FSE, 201