Explainability of AI systems is critical for users to take informed actions and hold systems accountable. While "opening the opaque box" is important, understanding who opens the box can govern if the Human-AI interaction is effective. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-methods study of how two different groups of whos--people with and without a background in AI--perceive different types of AI explanations. These groups were chosen to look at how disparities in AI backgrounds can exacerbate the creator-consumer gap. We quantitatively share what the perceptions are along five dimensions: confidence, intelligence, understandability, second chance, and friendliness. Qualitatively, we highlight how the AI background influences each group's interpretations and elucidate why the differences might exist through the lenses of appropriation and cognitive heuristics. We find that (1) both groups had unwarranted faith in numbers, to different extents and for different reasons, (2) each group found explanatory values in different explanations that went beyond the usage we designed them for, and (3) each group had different requirements of what counts as humanlike explanations. Using our findings, we discuss potential negative consequences such as harmful manipulation of user trust and propose design interventions to mitigate them. By bringing conscious awareness to how and why AI backgrounds shape perceptions of potential creators and consumers in XAI, our work takes a formative step in advancing a pluralistic Human-centered Explainable AI discourse.

Conversational agents, or chatbots, providing question-answer assistance on smart devices, have proliferated in recent years and are poised to transform online customer services of corporate sectors.1,6 Implemented through dialogue management systems, chatbots converse through voice-based and textual dialogue, and harness natural language processing and artificial intelligence to recognize requests, provide responses, and predict user behavior.5,28 Market analysts concur on current adoption trends and the magnitude of growth and impact of chatbots anticipated in the next five years. According to a report by Grand View Research, for instance, already 45% of users prefer chatbots as the primary point of communications for customer service enquiries, translating into a global'chatbot' market of $1.23 billion by 2025, at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3%.9 The strategy for conducting conversations using chatbots requires an efficient resolution of two key aspects. First, user queries or automatically perceived needs through user interactions have to be interpreted and mapped into categories, or user intents. This is based on historical processing of queries and needs, and the use of intent classification techniques.12 Second, conversations must be constructed for specific intents using frame-based dialogue management2 and neural response generation techniques.15 In frame-based dialogue management, the chatbot needs to converse with the user to have a fully filled frame (for example, flight information) in which all slot values are provided by the user (for example, airline carrier, departure time, departure location, and arrival location). The dialogue flow is constructed through an ordered sequence of frames.

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video games, but they require vast quantities of experience to learn successfully -- none of today's algorithms account for the human ability to learn so many different tasks, so quickly. Here we propose a new approach to this challenge based on a particularly strong form of model-based RL which we call Theory-Based Reinforcement Learning, because it uses human-like intuitive theories -- rich, abstract, causal models of physical objects, intentional agents, and their interactions -- to explore and model an environment, and plan effectively to achieve task goals. We instantiate the approach in a video game playing agent called EMPA (the Exploring, Modeling, and Planning Agent), which performs Bayesian inference to learn probabilistic generative models expressed as programs for a game-engine simulator, and runs internal simulations over these models to support efficient object-based, relational exploration and heuristic planning. EMPA closely matches human learning efficiency on a suite of 90 challenging Atari-style video games, learning new games in just minutes of game play and generalizing robustly to new game situations and new levels. The model also captures fine-grained structure in people's exploration trajectories and learning dynamics. Its design and behavior suggest a way forward for building more general human-like AI systems.

Many guides give you advice on how to get started in data science: which online courses to take, which projects to implement for your portfolio, and which skills to acquire. But what if you got started with your learning journey, and now you are somewhere in the middle and don't know where to go next? After finishing my Data Scientist nanodegree at Udacity, I was at that middle point. I had built a foundation in various data science topics -- ML, deep neural networks, NLP, recommendation systems, and more -- and my learning curve had been very steep. So I felt that simply taking another online course wouldn't yield as many "things learned per day."

AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.

The pervasiveness of abusive content on the internet can lead to severe psychological and physical harm. Significant effort in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been devoted to addressing this problem through abusive content detection and related sub-areas, such as the detection of hate speech, toxicity, cyberbullying, etc. Although current technologies achieve high classification performance in research studies, it has been observed that the real-life application of this technology can cause unintended harms, such as the silencing of under-represented groups. We review a large body of NLP research on automatic abuse detection with a new focus on ethical challenges, organized around eight established ethical principles: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. In many cases, these principles relate not only to situational ethical codes, which may be context-dependent, but are in fact connected to universal human rights, such as the right to privacy, freedom from discrimination, and freedom of expression. We highlight the need to examine the broad social impacts of this technology, and to bring ethical and human rights considerations to every stage of the application life-cycle, from task formulation and dataset design, to model training and evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including ‘nudging’, ‘quarantining’, value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including 'nudging', 'quarantining', value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.

Most machine learning algorithms are configured by one or several hyperparameters that must be carefully chosen and often considerably impact performance. To avoid a time consuming and unreproducible manual trial-and-error process to find well-performing hyperparameter configurations, various automatic hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods, e.g., based on resampling error estimation for supervised machine learning, can be employed. After introducing HPO from a general perspective, this paper reviews important HPO methods such as grid or random search, evolutionary algorithms, Bayesian optimization, Hyperband and racing. It gives practical recommendations regarding important choices to be made when conducting HPO, including the HPO algorithms themselves, performance evaluation, how to combine HPO with ML pipelines, runtime improvements, and parallelization.

There is mounting public concern over the influence that AI based systems has in our society. Coalitions in all sectors are acting worldwide to resist hamful applications of AI. From indigenous people addressing the lack of reliable data, to smart city stakeholders, to students protesting the academic relationships with sex trafficker and MIT donor Jeffery Epstein, the questionable ethics and values of those heavily investing in and profiting from AI are under global scrutiny. There are biased, wrongful, and disturbing assumptions embedded in AI algorithms that could get locked in without intervention. Our best human judgment is needed to contain AI's harmful impact. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of AI will be to make us ultimately understand how important human wisdom truly is in life on earth.

Perhaps, the modern definition of AI - as the ensemble of computer systems empowered with the ability to learn from data through statistical techniques - can be dated back to 1959. Machine Learning (ML), a subclass of AI, is a discipline that aims at studying algorithms that are able to learn from experience and data to perform tasks without following explicit instructions. Often, these algorithms are based on a computational model that belongs to differentiable programming techniques, called Neural Networks (NNs). The success of such algorithms resides in their ability to learn to achieve a specific goal [95, 121], i.e., they learn to discover hidden patterns and relations among data to fulfill the task at hand [89, 120]. Mathematically, NNs are made of a sequence of transformations, called layers, composed of affine operators and elementwise nonlinearities. Then, the goal of learning is to modify the transformations' parameters to fulfill a task successfully. Whenever a model accounts for more than a couple of such layers, it is called a Deep Learning (DL) model or a Deep Neural Network (DNN). Thanks to their enormous representation power and the development of new technologies and training algorithms, DL models obtained astonishing results in the last two decades, achieving superhuman performance on certain tasks [177].

The common belief about the growing medium of livestreaming is that its value lies in its "live" component. In this paper, we leverage data from a large livestreaming platform to examine this belief. We are able to do this as this platform also allows viewers to purchase the recorded version of the livestream. We summarize the value of livestreaming content by estimating how demand responds to price before, on the day of, and after the livestream. We do this by proposing a generalized Orthogonal Random Forest framework. This framework allows us to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of high-dimensional confounders whose relationships with the treatment policy (i.e., price) are complex but partially known. We find significant dynamics in the price elasticity of demand over the temporal distance to the scheduled livestreaming day and after. Specifically, demand gradually becomes less price sensitive over time to the livestreaming day and is inelastic on the livestreaming day. Over the post-livestream period, demand is still sensitive to price, but much less than the pre-livestream period. This indicates that the vlaue of livestreaming persists beyond the live component. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence for the likely mechanisms driving our results. These are quality uncertainty reduction for the patterns pre- and post-livestream and the potential of real-time interaction with the creator on the day of the livestream.