Zeitenwende — Turn of Eras
A new wave of innovation disrupts our social and economic life as we have lived it in the 20th century. On the one hand, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to increase our efficiency and ability to cope with the changes that are coming. On the other hand, AI itself also causes disruptions that may be managed best by contributions from other fields. We aim to start an interdisciplinary discourse with this special issue and bring together a set of articles from AI researchers, sociologists, economists, and psychologists who discuss five basic questions: How can AI help? How will AI affect economy and work? How does AI affect democracy? How does AI affect our togetherness? And how does AI affect the human self?
Contributors
Meinolf Sellmann
GE Global Research
Bart Selman
Cornell University
Rethinking the Maturity of Artificial Intelligence in Safety-Critical Settings
Artificial intelligence, in the form of machine learning, has the potential to transform many safety-critical applications such as those in transportation and healthcare. However, despite significant investment and impressive demonstrations, such technologies have struggled to live up to their promises. To this end, this article illustrates that machine learning fundamentally lacks the ability to leverage top-down reasoning, a critical element in safety-critical systems. This is especially important in situations where uncertainty can grow very quickly, requiring adaption to unknowns. This fundamental lack of contextual reasoning, combined with a lack of understanding of what constitutes maturity in artificial intelligence-embedded systems, has significantly contributed to the failures of these systems. Demonstrations where safety-critical artificial intelligence-enabled systems function as if they were almost operational should not be a substitute for testing. Instead, companies and regulatory agencies need to work together to develop clear criteria and certification protocols before such technologies are made publicly available.
Contributors
Mary L. Cummings
Duke University
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work: A Proactive Strategy
One of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time lies in harnessing the innovative potential of emerging technologies to help achieve a more prosperous and just society. Discussions of how to do so are at the center of debates over how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated tools might affect the future of work. In this article, I will outline a proactive strategy for addressing these issues.
Contributors
Thomas A. Kochan
MIT Sloan School of Management, Institute for Work and Employment Research ISIP member, AIAA Associate Fellow, SPIE Fellow, and IEEE Fellow.
Artificial Intelligence Community and Self
The means by which artificial intelligence systems will both interact and influence individuals and community are considered, with a description of current capabilities such as video analytics, agency, natural language processing, and online data analysis. Open research questions such as the roles of analogies, associative memory, and the grounding problem are discussed, with speculation presented regarding the possible ramification of this research agenda. Such topics will include how artificial intelligence and humanity might co-evolve; artificial creativity; and life without work.
Contributors
Peter Tu
General Electric
Procedural Democracy and Electronic Agents
In recent years, firms offering political campaigning and fundraising services have claimed that artificial intelligence is used to maximize their clients’ interests. Numerous news reports suggest that artificial intelligence capacities have influenced high-profile voting events; publications decrying the threat posed to democratic procedures are proliferating. This article takes a skeptical view of such claims, with an argument in six sections. First, the received principles of procedural democracy in relation to voting events are outlined. Second, the kind of services in question are considered. Third, to what extent these services actually involve artificial intelligence is pondered. Fourth, how such technological capacities may bear upon the tenets of procedural democracy are raised. Fifth, it is argued that it is unlikely that those tenets are indeed significantly undermined in practice. And sixth, this article concludes by considering the implications of it being proven that such technological capacities do play a decisive role in voting events.
Contributors
Suman Gupta
The Open University
Artificial and Human Intelligence in Mental Health
While technology has dramatically changed medical practice, various aspects of mental health practice and diagnosis remain almost unchanged across decades. Here we argue that artificial intelligence — with its capacity to learn and infer from data the workings of the human mind — may rapidly change this scenario. However, this process will not happen without friction and will promote an explicit reflection of the overarching goals and foundational aspects of mental health. We suggest that the converse relation is also very likely to happen. The application of artificial intelligence to a field that relates to the foundations of what makes us human — our volition, our thoughts, our pains and pleasures — may shift artificial intelligence back to its earliest days, when it was mostly conceived of as a laboratory to explore the limits and possibilities of human intelligence.
Contributors
Mariano Sigman
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Diego Fernandez Slezak
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Lucas Drucaroff
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Sidarta Ribeiro
Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte
Facundo Carrillo
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Machine Learning Techniques for Accountability
Artificial intelligence systems have provided us with many everyday conveniences. We can easily search for information across millions of webpages via text and voice. Paperwork processing is increasingly automated. Artificial intelligence systems flag potentially fraudulent credit-card transactions and filter our e-mail. Yet these artificial intelligence systems have also experienced significant failings. Across a range of applications, including loan approvals, disease severity scores, hiring algorithms, and face recognition, artificial-intelligence–based scoring systems have exhibited gender and racial bias. Self-driving cars have had serious accidents. As these systems become more prevalent, it is increasingly important that we identify the best ways to keep them accountable.
Contributors
Been Kim
Google Brain
Finale Doshi-Velez
Harvard University
Using a Machine Learning Tool to Support High-Stakes Decisions in Child Protection
Machine learning decision support tools have become popular in a range of social domains including healthcare, criminal justice, and child welfare. But the design of these tools often fails to consider the potentially complex interactions that happen between the tools and humans. This lack of human-centered design is one reason that so few tools are actually deployed, and even if they are, struggle to achieve impact. In this article we present the example of the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, a machine learning model used since 2016 to support hotline screening of child maltreatment referrals. We describe aspects of human-centered design that contributed to the successful deployment of this tool, including agency leadership and ownership, transparency by design, ethical oversight, community engagement, and social license. Finally, we identify potential next-steps to encourage greater integration of human-centered design into the development and implementation of machine learning decision support tools.
Contributors
Rhema Vaithianathan
Center for Social Data Analytics
Diana Benavides-Prado
Centre for Social Data Analytics
Erin Dalton
Allegheny County Department of Human Services
Alex Chouldechova
Carnegie Mellon University
Emily Putnam-Hornstein
University of North Carolina
The Case Against Registered Reports
Registered reports have been proposed as a way to move from eye-catching and surprising results and toward methodologically sound practices and interesting research questions. However, none of the top-twenty artificial intelligence journals support registered reports, and no traces of registered reports can be found in the field of artificial intelligence. Is this because they do not provide value for the type of research that is conducted in the field of artificial intelligence?
Contributors
Odd Erik Gundersen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
The Role of Open-Source Software in Artificial Intelligence
With this publication, we launch a new column for AI Magazine on the role of open-source software in artificial intelligence. As the column editor, I would like to extend my welcome and invite AI Magazine readers to send short articles for future columns, which may appear in the traditional print version of AI Magazine, or on the AI Magazine interactive site currently under development. This introductory column serves to highlight my interests in open-source software and to propose a few topics for future columns.
Contributors
Jim Spohrer
IBM
AAAI's New Award for the Societal Benefits of AI — An Interview with Richard Tong
In this interview, conducted in early 2020 by Ashok Goel, Richard Tong, the chief architect and general manager of Squirrel AI Learning’s US operations, discusses adaptive learning, challenges facing AI in education, and the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Humanity.
Contributors
Richard Tong
Squirrel AI
Ashok Goel
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Role of Open-Source Software in Artificial Intelligence
With this publication, we launch a new column for AI Magazine on the role of open-source software in artificial intelligence. As the column editor, I would like to extend my welcome and invite AI Magazine readers to send short articles for future columns, which may appear in the traditional print version of AI Magazine, or on the AI Magazine interactive site currently under development. This introductory column serves to highlight my interests in open-source software and to propose a few topics for future columns.
Contributors
Jim Spohrer
IBM
Artificial Intelligence’s Grand Challenges: Past, Present, and Future
Innovative, bold initiatives that capture the imagination of researchers and system builders are often required to spur a field of science or technology forward. A vision for the future of artificial intelligence was laid out by Turing Award winner Raj Reddy in his 1988 Presidential address to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. It is time to provide an accounting of the progress that has been made in the field, over the last three decades, toward the challenge goals. While some tasks such as the world-champion chess machine were accomplished in short order, many others, such as self-replicating systems, require more focus and breakthroughs for completion. A new set of challenges for the current decade is also proposed, spanning the health, wealth, and wisdom spheres.
Contributors
Ganesh Mani
Frank Chen
Steve Cross
Thomas Kalil
Vanathi Gopalakrishnan
Francesca Rossi
Ken Stanley
Organizing a Successful Artificial Intelligence Online Conference: Lessons from the 13th Symposium on Combinatorial Search
The 13th Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) was held May 26 to 28, 2020. Originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, the symposium pivoted toward a fully online technical program in early March. As an in-person event, SoCS offers participants a diverse array of scholarly activities including technical talks (long and short), poster sessions, plenary sessions, a community meeting and, new for 2020, a Master Class tutorial program. This article describes challenges, approaches, and opportunities associated with adapting these many different activities to the online setting. We consider issues such as scheduling, dissemination, attendee interaction, and community engagement before, during, and after the event. In each case, we report on the approaches taken by SoCS, then give a post hoc analysis of their effectiveness and discuss how these decisions continue to impact the SoCS community in the days after SoCS 2020. This work will be of interest to organizers of similar conferences who may be considering the switch to an online format.
Contributors
Daniel Harabor
Mauro Vallati
University of Huddersfield
Advances in Theory and Applications of Artificial Intelligence
The 33rd International Conference on Industrial, Engineering, and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems was held in Kitakyushu, Japan on 22 to 25 September 2020. This report provides an overview and summary of the conference.
Contributors
Hamido Fujita
University of Granada
Philippe Fournier-Viger
Harbin Institute of Technology
Jun Sasaki
Iwate Prefectural University
Moonis Ali
Texas State University
Report on the First and Second Workshops on Hierarchical Planning Held at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
Hierarchical planning has attracted renewed interest in the last few years. Consequently, the time was right to establish a workshop devoted entirely to hierarchical planning — an insight shared by many supporters. In this article, we report on the first International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling workshop on hierarchical planning held in Delft, The Netherlands, in 2018 as well as on the second workshop held in Berkeley, CA, USA, in 2019.
Contributors
Pascal Bercher
Australian National University
Daniel Höller
Saarland University
Gregor Behnke
University of Freiburg
Susanne Biundo
Ulm University
Vikas Shivashankar
Amazon Robotics
Ron Alford
MITRE Corporation