Counterfactual explanations for land cover mapping: interview with Cassio Dantas

In their paper Counterfactual Explanations for Land Cover Mapping in a Multi-class Setting, Cassio Dantas, Diego Marcos and Dino Ienco apply counterfactual explanations to remote sensing time series data for land-cover mapping classification. In this interview, Cassio tell us more about explainable AI and counterfactuals, the team's research methodology, and their main findings. Our paper falls into the growing topic of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Despite the performances achieved by recent deep learning approaches, they remain black-box models with limited understanding of their internal behavior. To improve general acceptability and trustworthiness of such models, there is a growing need to improve their interpretability and make their decision-making processes more transparent.