Algorithmic decision making has proliferated and now impacts our daily lives in both mundane and consequential ways. Machine learning practitioners make use of a myriad of algorithms for predictive models in applications as diverse as movie recommendations, medical diagnoses, and parole recommendations without delving into the reasons driving specific predictive decisions. Machine learning algorithms in such applications are often chosen for their superior performance, however popular choices such as random forest and deep neural networks fail to provide an interpretable understanding of the predictive model. In recent years, rule-based algorithms have been used to address this issue. Wang et al. (2017) presented an or-of-and (disjunctive normal form) based classification technique that allows for classification rule mining of a single class in a binary classification; this method is also shown to perform comparably to other modern algorithms. In this work, we extend this idea to provide classification rules for both classes simultaneously. That is, we provide a distinct set of rules for both positive and negative classes. In describing this approach, we also present a novel and complete taxonomy of classifications that clearly capture and quantify the inherent ambiguity in noisy binary classifications in the real world. We show that this approach leads to a more granular formulation of the likelihood model and a simulated-annealing based optimization achieves classification performance competitive with comparable techniques. We apply our method to synthetic as well as real world data sets to compare with other related methods that demonstrate the utility of our proposal.

The importance of algorithmic fairness grows with the increasing impact machine learning has on people's lives. Recent work on fairness metrics shows the need for causal reasoning in fairness constraints. In this work, a practical method named FairTrade is proposed for creating flexible prediction models which integrate fairness constraints on sensitive causal paths. The method uses recent advances in variational inference in order to account for unobserved confounders. Further, a method outline is proposed which uses the causal mechanism estimates to audit black box models. Experiments are conducted on simulated data and on a real dataset in the context of detecting unlawful social welfare. This research aims to contribute to machine learning techniques which honour our ethical and legal boundaries.

Automated machine learning is likely to introduce two critical problems. Fortunately, vendors are introducing tools to tackle both of them. Adoption of automated machine learning -- tools that help data scientists and business analysts (and even business users) automate the construction of machine learning models -- is expected to increase over the next few years because these tools simplify model building. For example, in some of the tools, all the user needs to do is specify the outcome or target variable of interest along with the attributes believed to be predictive. The automated machine learning (autoML) platform picks the best model.

When it comes to the introduction of the latest technologies, the legal sector is known to lead the way. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have taken shape in the legal industry, saving time and administrative work and bringing many other benefits. Companies are now starting to introduce various technologies that can simplify the process, ensure greater accuracy and improve compliance with data protection rules. While the use of AI can have its benefits, it is equally important to understand when not to use it to ensure that law firms can continue to provide the best services to their clients. The legal industry begins its journey with the use of machine learning, which permeates almost the entire workflow of a law firm.

Ongoing technological advancements in automation and artificial intelligence(AI) guarantee to disrupt the very foundations of how legal work is conducted and delivered. However, how they challenge current plans of action, where they experience resistance, and how the advantages of automation can be realized stay unexplored. Current patterns show how technology and market pressures consolidate to challenge the business models of legal administrations and firms. Intelligent automation and law join hands to make creative AI solutions and applications to automate repetitive lawful procedures, for example, reviewing documents or recognizing basic clauses. Artificial intelligence and the law are fields you wouldn't think would blend in agreement.

Legal scholars have in the last several years embarked upon an ongoing discussion and debate over a potential Legal Singularity that might someday occur, involving a variant or law-domain offshoot leveraged from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) realm amid its many decades of deliberations about an overarching and generalized technological singularity (referred to classically as The Singularity). This paper examines the postulated Legal Singularity and proffers that such AI and Law cogitations can be enriched by these three facets addressed herein: (1) dovetail additionally salient considerations of The Singularity into the Legal Singularity, (2) make use of an in-depth and innovative multidimensional parametric analysis of the Legal Singularity as posited in this paper, and (3) align and unify the Legal Singularity with the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) associated with AI Legal Reasoning (AILR) as propounded in this paper.

In their work, Dean, Rich, and Recht create a model to research recourse and availability of items in a recommender system. We used the definition of predictive multiplicity by Marx, Pin Calmon, and Ustun to examine different variations of this model, using different values for two model parameters. Pairwise comparison of their models show, that most of these models produce very similar results in terms of discrepancy and ambiguity for the availability and only in some cases the availability sets differ significantly.

Earlier this year, the independent research organisation of which I am the Director, London-based Ada Lovelace Institute, hosted a panel at the world's largest AI conference, CogX, called The Ethics Panel to End All Ethics Panels. The title referenced both a tongue-in-cheek effort at self-promotion, and a very real need to put to bed the seemingly endless offering of panels, think-pieces, and government reports preoccupied with ruminating on the abstract ethical questions posed by AI and new data-driven technologies. We had grown impatient with conceptual debates and high-level principles. And we were not alone. It supersedes the two waves that came before it: the first wave, defined by principles and dominated by philosophers, and the second wave, led by computer scientists and geared towards technical fixes. Third-wave ethical AI has seen a Dutch Court shut down an algorithmic fraud detection system, students in the UK take to the streets to protest against algorithmically-decided exam results, and US companies voluntarily restrict their sales of facial recognition technology.

Urban planning refers to the efforts of designing land-use configurations. Effective urban planning can help to mitigate the operational and social vulnerability of a urban system, such as high tax, crimes, traffic congestion and accidents, pollution, depression, and anxiety. Due to the high complexity of urban systems, such tasks are mostly completed by professional planners. But, human planners take longer time. The recent advance of deep learning motivates us to ask: can machines learn at a human capability to automatically and quickly calculate land-use configuration, so human planners can finally adjust machine-generated plans for specific needs? To this end, we formulate the automated urban planning problem into a task of learning to configure land-uses, given the surrounding spatial contexts. To set up the task, we define a land-use configuration as a longitude-latitude-channel tensor, where each channel is a category of POIs and the value of an entry is the number of POIs. The objective is then to propose an adversarial learning framework that can automatically generate such tensor for an unplanned area. In particular, we first characterize the contexts of surrounding areas of an unplanned area by learning representations from spatial graphs using geographic and human mobility data. Second, we combine each unplanned area and its surrounding context representation as a tuple, and categorize all the tuples into positive (well-planned areas) and negative samples (poorly-planned areas). Third, we develop an adversarial land-use configuration approach, where the surrounding context representation is fed into a generator to generate a land-use configuration, and a discriminator learns to distinguish among positive and negative samples.

As always, the fields of deep learning and natural language processing are as busy as ever. Despite many industries being hindered by the quarantine restrictions in many countries, the machine learning industry continues to move forward. It seems almost every week, new models are being released, and new startups are showing off AI-powered technologies that will help build a better world. In this article, we will briefly go over some of the biggest recent news in NLP and deep learning, as well as some must-read guides, feature articles, tools, resources, and datasets you may want to check out. From Nikunj Aggarwal, the Machine Learning Lead at Citizen, this article gives us a great example of how deep learning is being used to create life-changing (or life-saving) technologies. Citizen is an emergency and safety alert app that warns people of incidents and crimes that have taken place in their area in real-time.