Oracle quietly researching 'Explainable AI'

Explainable AI – or XAI – is a relatively new research area that hopes to'open the black box' on deep learning neural networks, complex algorithms and probabilistic graphical models. Artificial intelligence systems that can explain their decision making process in human terms are now the subject of intense research by software and cloud vendor Oracle, the company's senior vice-president of data-driven applications revealed to Computerworld yesterday. "One thing we don't make a big call out to is that we have a dedicated research team at Oracle called Oracle labs, mostly PhD computer scientists. And we have a lot of research going on that we don't tend to advertise very much in those research groups looking into that specific research area," said Clive Swan on the fringes of Oracle's Modern Business Experience event in Sydney. "It remains a big area of academic research. That problem is…very difficult academically to solve in some cases, and frankly varies from algorithm to algorithm."