You better explain yourself, mister: DARPA's mission to make an accountable AI

The US government's mighty DARPA last year kicked off a research project designed to make systems controlled by artificial intelligence more accountable to their human users. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to use this $2.97bn agency its full name, is the Department of Defense's body responsible for emerging technology for use by the US armed forces. Significantly, it was DARPA's early funding of packet-switching network the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) more than 40 years ago that helped bring about the internet. Coming bang up to date, the issue at the heart of the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) programme is that AI is starting to extend into many areas of everyday life yet the internal workings of such systems are often opaque, and could be concealing flaws in their decision-making processes. The field of AI has made great strides in the last several years, thanks to developments in machine learning algorithms and deep learning systems based on artificial neural networks (ANNs).