Following on from the publication of its Feasibility Study in December 2020, the Council of Europe's Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI) and its subgroups initiated efforts to formulate and draft its Possible Elements of a Legal Framework on Artificial Intelligence, based on the Council of Europe's standards on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. This document was ultimately adopted by the CAHAI plenary in December 2021. To support this effort, The Alan Turing Institute undertook a programme of research that explored the governance processes and practical tools needed to operationalise the integration of human right due diligence with the assurance of trustworthy AI innovation practices. The resulting framework was completed and submitted to the Council of Europe in September 2021. It presents an end-to-end approach to the assurance of AI project lifecycles that integrates context-based risk analysis and appropriate stakeholder engagement with comprehensive impact assessment, and transparent risk management, impact mitigation, and innovation assurance practices. Taken together, these interlocking processes constitute a Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law Assurance Framework (HUDERAF). The HUDERAF combines the procedural requirements for principles-based human rights due diligence with the governance mechanisms needed to set up technical and socio-technical guardrails for responsible and trustworthy AI innovation practices. Its purpose is to provide an accessible and user-friendly set of mechanisms for facilitating compliance with a binding legal framework on artificial intelligence, based on the Council of Europe's standards on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, and to ensure that AI innovation projects are carried out with appropriate levels of public accountability, transparency, and democratic governance.

The state of artificial intelligence technology has a rich history that dates back decades and includes two fall-outs before the explosive resurgence of today, which is credited largely to data-driven techniques. While AI technology has and continues to become increasingly mainstream with impact across domains and industries, it's not without several drawbacks, weaknesses, and potential to cause undesired effects. AI techniques are numerous with many approaches and variants, but they can be classified simply based on the degree of knowledge they capture and how much data they require; two broad categories emerge as prominent across AI to date: (1) techniques that are primarily, and often solely, data-driven while leveraging little to no knowledge and (2) techniques that primarily leverage knowledge and depend less on data. Now, a third category is starting to emerge that leverages both data and knowledge, that some refer to as "informed AI." This third category can be a game changer within the national security domain where there is ample scientific and domain-specific knowledge that stands ready to be leveraged, and where purely data-driven AI can lead to serious unwanted consequences. This report shares findings from a thorough exploration of AI approaches that exploit data as well as principled and/or practical knowledge, which we refer to as "knowledge-integrated informed AI." Specifically, we review illuminating examples of knowledge integrated in deep learning and reinforcement learning pipelines, taking note of the performance gains they provide. We also discuss an apparent trade space across variants of knowledge-integrated informed AI, along with observed and prominent issues that suggest worthwhile future research directions. Most importantly, this report suggests how the advantages of knowledge-integrated informed AI stand to benefit the national security domain.

The term"dox" is an abbreviation for"documents," and doxing is the act of disclosing private, sensitive, or personally identifiable information about a person without their consent. Sensitive information can be considered as any type of confidential information or any information that can be used to identify a person uniquely. This information is called doxed information and includes demographic information [53] such as birthday, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and religion, or location information which can be used to precisely or approximately locate a person such as the street address, ZIP code, IP address, and GPS coordinates. Other categories of doxed information are identity documents like passport number and social security number, contact information like phone number and email address, financial information such as credit card and bank account details, or sign-in credentials such as usernames and passwords[15]. Such disclosure may have various consequences. It may encourage forms of bigotry and hate groups, encourage human or child trafficking and endanger people's lives or reputations, scare and intimidate people by swatting

Encoding facts as representations of entities and binary relationships between them, as learned by knowledge graph representation models, is useful for various tasks, including predicting new facts, question answering, fact checking and information retrieval. The focus of this thesis is on (i) improving knowledge graph representation with the aim of tackling the link prediction task; and (ii) devising a theory on how semantics can be captured in the geometry of relation representations. Most knowledge graphs are very incomplete and manually adding new information is costly, which drives the development of methods which can automatically infer missing facts. The first contribution of this thesis is HypER, a convolutional model which simplifies and improves upon the link prediction performance of the existing convolutional state-of-the-art model ConvE and can be mathematically explained in terms of constrained tensor factorisation. The second contribution is TuckER, a relatively straightforward linear model, which, at the time of its introduction, obtained state-of-the-art link prediction performance across standard datasets. The third contribution is MuRP, first multi-relational graph representation model embedded in hyperbolic space. MuRP outperforms all existing models and its Euclidean counterpart MuRE in link prediction on hierarchical knowledge graph relations whilst requiring far fewer dimensions. Despite the development of a large number of knowledge graph representation models with gradually increasing predictive performance, relatively little is known of the latent structure they learn. We generalise recent theoretical understanding of how semantic relations of similarity, paraphrase and analogy are encoded in the geometric interactions of word embeddings to how more general relations, as found in knowledge graphs, can be encoded in their representations.

We introduce Contrastive Intrinsic Control (CIC), an algorithm for unsupervised skill discovery that maximizes the mutual information between skills and state transitions. In contrast to most prior approaches, CIC uses a decomposition of the mutual information that explicitly incentivizes diverse behaviors by maximizing state entropy. We derive a novel lower bound estimate for the mutual information which combines a particle estimator for state entropy to generate diverse behaviors and contrastive learning to distill these behaviors into distinct skills. We evaluate our algorithm on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark, which consists of a long reward-free pre-training phase followed by a short adaptation phase to downstream tasks with extrinsic rewards. We find that CIC substantially improves over prior unsupervised skill discovery methods and outperforms the next leading overall exploration algorithm in terms of downstream task performance.

Ranking, recommendation, and retrieval systems are widely used in online platforms and other societal systems, including e-commerce, media-streaming, admissions, gig platforms, and hiring. In the recent past, a large "fair ranking" research literature has been developed around making these systems fair to the individuals, providers, or content that are being ranked. Most of this literature defines fairness for a single instance of retrieval, or as a simple additive notion for multiple instances of retrievals over time. This work provides a critical overview of this literature, detailing the often context-specific concerns that such an approach misses: the gap between high ranking placements and true provider utility, spillovers and compounding effects over time, induced strategic incentives, and the effect of statistical uncertainty. We then provide a path forward for a more holistic and impact-oriented fair ranking research agenda, including methodological lessons from other fields and the role of the broader stakeholder community in overcoming data bottlenecks and designing effective regulatory environments.

Automated hiring systems are among the fastest-developing of all high-stakes AI systems. Among these are algorithmic personality tests that use insights from psychometric testing, and promise to surface personality traits indicative of future success based on job seekers' resumes or social media profiles. We interrogate the validity of such systems using stability of the outputs they produce, noting that reliability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for validity. Our approach is to (a) develop a methodology for an external audit of stability of predictions made by algorithmic personality tests, and (b) instantiate this methodology in an audit of two systems, Humantic AI and Crystal. Crucially, rather than challenging or affirming the assumptions made in psychometric testing -- that personality is a meaningful and measurable construct, and that personality traits are indicative of future success on the job -- we frame our methodology around testing the underlying assumptions made by the vendors of the algorithmic personality tests themselves. In our audit of Humantic AI and Crystal, we find that both systems show substantial instability with respect to key facets of measurement, and so cannot be considered valid testing instruments. For example, Crystal frequently computes different personality scores if the same resume is given in PDF vs. in raw text format, violating the assumption that the output of an algorithmic personality test is stable across job-irrelevant variations in the input. Among other notable findings is evidence of persistent -- and often incorrect -- data linkage by Humantic AI.

The application of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to a broad variety of tasks demands methods for coping with the complex and opaque nature of these architectures. The analysis of performance can be pursued in two ways. On one side, model interpretation techniques aim at "opening the box" to assess the relationship between the input, the inner layers, and the output. For example, saliency and attention models exploit knowledge of the architecture to capture the essential regions of the input that have the most impact on the inference process and output. On the other hand, models can be analysed as "black boxes", e.g., by associating the input samples with extra annotations that do not contribute to model training but can be exploited for characterizing the model response. Such performance-driven meta-annotations enable the detailed characterization of performance metrics and errors and help scientists identify the features of the input responsible for prediction failures and focus their model improvement efforts. This paper presents a structured survey of the tools that support the "black box" analysis of DNNs and discusses the gaps in the current proposals and the relevant future directions in this research field.

This is Part II of the two-part comprehensive survey devoted to a computing framework most commonly known under the names Hyperdimensional Computing and Vector Symbolic Architectures (HDC/VSA). Both names refer to a family of computational models that use high-dimensional distributed representations and rely on the algebraic properties of their key operations to incorporate the advantages of structured symbolic representations and vector distributed representations. Holographic Reduced Representations is an influential HDC/VSA model that is well-known in the machine learning domain and often used to refer to the whole family. However, for the sake of consistency, we use HDC/VSA to refer to the area. Part I of this survey covered foundational aspects of the area, such as historical context leading to the development of HDC/VSA, key elements of any HDC/VSA model, known HDC/VSA models, and transforming input data of various types into high-dimensional vectors suitable for HDC/VSA. This second part surveys existing applications, the role of HDC/VSA in cognitive computing and architectures, as well as directions for future work. Most of the applications lie within the machine learning/artificial intelligence domain, however we also cover other applications to provide a thorough picture. The survey is written to be useful for both newcomers and practitioners.

There is growing evidence that the classical notion of adversarial robustness originally introduced for images has been adopted as a de facto standard by a large part of the NLP research community. We show that this notion is problematic in the context of NLP as it considers a narrow spectrum of linguistic phenomena. In this paper, we argue for semantic robustness, which is better aligned with the human concept of linguistic fidelity. We characterize semantic robustness in terms of biases that it is expected to induce in a model. We study semantic robustness of a range of vanilla and robustly trained architectures using a template-based generative test bed. We complement the analysis with empirical evidence that, despite being harder to implement, semantic robustness can improve performance %gives guarantees for on complex linguistic phenomena where models robust in the classical sense fail.