Kyndi, an artificial intelligence startup building the first explainable AI platform, has secured$20 million in Series B funding to expand the company's engineering and sales teams to meet growing customer demand in government, financial services and life sciences. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from UL Ventures, PivotNorth Capital, and existing investors. Kyndi was founded in 2014 by Arun Majumdar, Paul Tarau, Ryan Welsh, and Shafe Ramsey. The Sillicon Valley-based startup is building the first Explainable AI platform for critical government and commercial institutions. Kyndi transforms business processes by offering auditable AI solutions.

Understanding how "black-box" models arrive at their predictions has sparked significant interest from both within and outside the AI community. Our work focuses on doing this by generating local explanations about individual predictions for tree-based ensembles, specifically Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs). Given a correctly predicted instance in the training set, we wish to generate a counterfactual explanation for this instance, that is, the minimal perturbation of this instance such that the prediction flips to the opposite class. Most existing methods for counterfactual explanations are (1) model-agnostic, so they do not take into account the structure of the original model, and/or (2) involve building a surrogate model on top of the original model, which is not guaranteed to represent the original model accurately. There exists a method specifically for random forests; we wish to extend this method for GBDTs. This involves accounting for (1) the sequential dependency between trees and (2) training on the negative gradients instead of the original labels.

Systems for automatic argument generation and debate require the ability to (1) determine the stance of any claims employed in the argument and (2) assess the specificity of each claim relative to the argument context. Existing work on understanding claim specificity and stance, however, has been limited to the study of argumentative structures that are relatively shallow, most often consisting of a single claim that directly supports or opposes the argument thesis. In this paper, we tackle these tasks in the context of complex arguments on a diverse set of topics. In particular, our dataset consists of manually curated argument trees for 741 controversial topics covering 95,312 unique claims; lines of argument are generally of depth 2 to 6. We find that as the distance between a pair of claims increases along the argument path, determining the relative specificity of a pair of claims becomes easier and determining their relative stance becomes harder.

Existing argumentation datasets have succeeded in allowing researchers to develop computational methods for analyzing the content, structure and linguistic features of argumentative text. They have been much less successful in fostering studies of the effect of "user" traits -- characteristics and beliefs of the participants -- on the debate/argument outcome as this type of user information is generally not available. This paper presents a dataset of 78, 376 debates generated over a 10-year period along with surprisingly comprehensive participant profiles. We also complete an example study using the dataset to analyze the effect of selected user traits on the debate outcome in comparison to the linguistic features typically employed in studies of this kind.

With the advent of GDPR, the domain of explainable AI and model interpretability has gained added impetus. Methods to extract and communicate visibility into decision-making models have become legal requirement. Two specific types of explanations, contrastive and counterfactual have been identified as suitable for human understanding. In this paper, we propose a model agnostic method and its systemic implementation to generate these explanations using shapely additive explanations (SHAP). We discuss a generative pipeline to create contrastive explanations and use it to further to generate counterfactual datapoints. This pipeline is tested and discussed on the IRIS, Wine Quality & Mobile Features dataset. Analysis of the results obtained follows.

Probabilistic epistemic argumentation allows for reasoning about argumentation problems in a way that is well founded by probability theory. Epistemic states are represented by probability functions over possible worlds and can be adjusted to new beliefs using update operators. While the use of probability functions puts this approach on a solid foundational basis, it also causes computational challenges as the amount of data to process depends exponentially on the number of arguments. This leads to bottlenecks in applications such as modelling opponent's beliefs for persuasion dialogues. We show how update operators over probability functions can be related to update operators over much more compact representations that allow polynomial-time updates. We discuss the cognitive and probabilistic-logical plausibility of this approach and demonstrate its applicability in computational persuasion.

Counterfactual post-hoc interpretability approaches have been proven to be useful tools to generate explanations for the predictions of a trained blackbox classifier. However, the assumptions they make about the data and the classifier make them unreliable in many contexts. In this paper, we discuss three desirable properties and approaches to quantify them: proximity, connectedness and stability. In addition, we illustrate that there is a risk for post-hoc counterfactual approaches to not satisfy these properties.

A remarkable time of human promise has been ushered in by the convergence of the ever-expanding availability of big data, the soaring speed and stretch of cloud computing platforms, and the advancement of increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Innovations in AI are already leaving a mark on government by improving the provision of essential social goods and services from healthcare, education, and transportation to food supply, energy, and environmental management. These bounties are likely just the start. The prospect that progress in AI will help government to confront some of its most urgent challenges is exciting, but legitimate worries abound. As with any new and rapidly evolving technology, a steep learning curve means that mistakes and miscalculations will be made and that both unanticipated and harmful impacts will occur. This guide, written for department and delivery leads in the UK public sector and adopted by the British Government in its publication, 'Using AI in the Public Sector,' identifies the potential harms caused by AI systems and proposes concrete, operationalisable measures to counteract them. It stresses that public sector organisations can anticipate and prevent these potential harms by stewarding a culture of responsible innovation and by putting in place governance processes that support the design and implementation of ethical, fair, and safe AI systems. It also highlights the need for algorithmically supported outcomes to be interpretable by their users and made understandable to decision subjects in clear, non-technical, and accessible ways. Finally, it builds out a vision of human-centred and context-sensitive implementation that gives a central role to communication, evidence-based reasoning, situational awareness, and moral justifiability.

Artificial intelligence doesn't need any extra fuel for the myths and misconceptions that surround it. Consider the phrase "black box" – its connotations are equal parts mysterious and ominous, the stuff of "The X Files" more than the day-to-day business of IT. Yet it's true that AI systems, such as machine learning or deep learning, take inputs and then produce outputs (or make decisions) with no decipherable explanation or context. The system makes a decision or takes some action, and we don't necessarily know why or how it arrived at that outcome. The system just does it.

Let's say that I find it curious how Spotify recommended a Justin Bieber song to me, a 40-something non-Belieber. That doesn't necessarily mean that Spotify's engineers must ensure that their algorithms are transparent and comprehensible to me; I might find the recommendation a tad off-target, but the consequences are decidedly minimal. This is a fundamental litmus test for explainable AI – that is, machine learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence systems that produce outcomes that humans can readily understand and track backwards to the origins. Conversely, relatively low-stakes AI systems might be just fine with the black box model, where we don't understand (and can't readily figure out) the results. "If algorithm results are low-impact enough, like the songs recommended by a music service, society probably doesn't need regulators plumbing the depths of how those recommendations are made," says Dave Costenaro, head of artificial intelligence R&D at Jane.ai. I can live with an app's misunderstanding of my musical tastes.