Explaining Factor Ascription

Explanation and justification of legal decisions has become a highly relevant topic in light of the explosion of interest in the use of machine learning (ML) approaches to predict legal decisions. Current suggestions are to use the established factor based explanations developed in AI and Law as the basis for explaining such programs. We, however, identify factor ascription as an important aspect of explanation of case outcomes not currently covered, and argue that explanations must also include this aspect. Finally, we outline our proposal for a hybrid system approach that combines ML and Abstract Dialectical Framework (ADF) layers to engender an explainable process.</jats:p

On the Complexity of Determining Defeat Relations Consistent with Abstract Argumentation Semantics

Typically in abstract argumentation, one starts with arguments and a defeat relation, and applies some semantics in order to determine the acceptability status of the arguments. We consider the converse case where we have knowledge of the acceptability status of arguments and want to identify a defeat relation that is consistent with the known acceptability data – the σ-consistency problem. Focusing on complete semantics as underpinning the majority of the major semantic types, we show that the complexity of determining a defeat relation that is consistent with some set of acceptability data is highly dependent on how the data is labelled. The extension-based 2-valued σ-consistency problem for complete semantics is revealed as NP-complete, whereas the labelling-based 3-valued σ-consistency problem is solvable within polynomial time. We then present an informal discussion on application to grounded, stable, and preferred semantics.</jats:p

The SunPy Project: An Interoperable Ecosystem for Solar Data Analysis

The SunPy Project is a community of scientists and software developers creating an ecosystem of Python packages for solar physics. The project includes the sunpy core package as well as a set of affiliated packages. The sunpy core package provides general purpose tools to access data from different providers, read image and time series data, and transform between commonly used coordinate systems. Affiliated packages perform more specialized tasks that do not fall within the more general scope of the sunpy core package. In this article, we give a high-level overview of the SunPy Project, how it is broader than the sunpy core package, and how the project curates and fosters the affiliated package system. We demonstrate how components of the SunPy ecosystem, including sunpy and several affiliated packages, work together to enable multi-instrument data analysis workflows. We also describe members of the SunPy Project and how the project interacts with the wider solar physics and scientific Python communities. Finally, we discuss the future direction and priorities of the SunPy Project.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, published in Frontier

Everyday Argumentative Explanations for Classification

In this paper we study everyday explanations for classification tasks with formal argumentation. Everyday explanations describe how humans explain in day-to-day life, which is important when explaining decisions of AI systems to lay users. We introduce EVAX, a model-agnostic explanation method for classifiers with which contrastive, selected and social explanations can be generated. The resulting explanations can be adjusted in their size and retain high fidelity scores (an average of 0.95

Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI: Volume 1

This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the first volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within artificial intelligence (AI), is highly relevant for researchers interested in symbolic representations of knowledge and defeasible reasoning. The purpose of this handbook is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the argumentation research community. OHAAI is designed to serve as a research hub to keep track of the latest and upcoming PhD-driven research on the theory and application of argumentation in all areas related to AI.Comment: editor: Federico Castagna and Francesca Mosca and Jack Mumford and Stefan Sarkadi and Andreas Xydi

A Survey of Computational Tools in Solar Physics

The SunPy Project developed a 13-question survey to understand the software and hardware usage of the solar physics community. 364 members of the solar physics community, across 35 countries, responded to our survey. We found that 99$\pm$0.5% of respondents use software in their research and 66% use the Python scientific software stack. Students are twice as likely as faculty, staff scientists, and researchers to use Python rather than Interactive Data Language (IDL). In this respect, the astrophysics and solar physics communities differ widely: 78% of solar physics faculty, staff scientists, and researchers in our sample uses IDL, compared with 44% of astrophysics faculty and scientists sampled by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015). 63$\pm$4% of respondents have not taken any computer-science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level. We also found that most respondents utilize consumer hardware to run software for solar-physics research. Although 82% of respondents work with data from space-based or ground-based missions, some of which (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope) produce terabytes of data a day, 14% use a regional or national cluster, 5% use a commercial cloud provider, and 29% use exclusively a laptop or desktop. Finally, we found that 73$\pm$4% of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only 42$\pm$3% do so routinely