With the rapid development of black-box machine learning (ML) models, such as deep neural networks or gradient boosting trees, the need for explanations of their decisions has emerged. This demand has been driven by the increasing implementation of opaque models, in high-risk and critical areas like medicine, healthcare, industry, and law, which laid the foundation for modern research on explainable and interpretable artificial intelligence (XAI). Scientists' efforts in designing XAI algorithms have been further supported by political initiatives such as DARPA's XAI challenge [1], the European Union's GDPR [2], and more recently, the EU AI Act [3]. The shared goal of all these initiatives is to improve the transparency of AI systems, thereby promoting their adoption in areas where trust in AI is not fully established or where the transparency of decisions is crucial for legal and safety reasons. However, as XAI algorithms have been advanced, a new discussion has been initiated, addressing the fundamental challenge of ensuring that the explanations generated by these algorithms are comprehensible to humans. This triggered research on the evaluation of XAI [4], drawing attention from social sciences, which argued that much of the effort in XAI relies solely on researchers' intuition about what constitutes a good explanation. They emphasized that human factors should be integral to the design and evaluation of XAI to ensure its reliability [5]. Recognizing individual human abilities to comprehend algorithmically generated explanations is crucial, as these abilities can vary significantly based on personal information competencies. Additionally, there is a lack of established multidisciplinary methods for measuring these capabilities, as well as datasets that facilitate reproducible evaluations or comprehensive analyses.

This study is located in the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) and focuses on the results of a user-centered assessment of commonly used eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) algorithms, specifically investigating how humans understand and interact with the explanations provided by these algorithms. To achieve this, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach that included state-of-the-art research methods from social sciences to measure the comprehensibility of explanations generated by a state-of-the-art lachine learning model, specifically the Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGBClassifier). We conducted an extensive empirical user study involving interviews with 39 participants from three different groups, each with varying expertise in data science, data visualization, and domain-specific knowledge related to the dataset used for training the machine learning model. Participants were asked a series of questions to assess their understanding of the model's explanations. To ensure replicability, we built the model using a publicly available dataset from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository, focusing on edible and non-edible mushrooms. Our findings reveal limitations in existing XAI methods and confirm the need for new design principles and evaluation techniques that address the specific information needs and user perspectives of different classes of AI stakeholders. We believe that the results of our research and the cross-disciplinary methodology we developed can be successfully adapted to various data types and user profiles, thus promoting dialogue and address opportunities in HCAI research. To support this, we are making the data resulting from our study publicly available.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) emerged as one of the pillars of Industry 4.0, and became crucial for enhancing operational efficiency, allowing to minimize downtime, extend lifespan of equipment, and prevent failures. A wide range of PdM tasks can be performed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, which often use data generated from industrial sensors. The steel industry, which is an important branch of the global economy, is one of the potential beneficiaries of this trend, given its large environmental footprint, the globalized nature of the market, and the demanding working conditions. This survey synthesizes the current state of knowledge in the field of AI-based PdM within the steel industry and is addressed to researchers and practitioners. We identified 219 articles related to this topic and formulated five research questions, allowing us to gain a global perspective on current trends and the main research gaps. We examined equipment and facilities subjected to PdM, determined common PdM approaches, and identified trends in the AI methods used to develop these solutions. We explored the characteristics of the data used in the surveyed articles and assessed the practical implications of the research presented there. Most of the research focuses on the blast furnace or hot rolling, using data from industrial sensors. Current trends show increasing interest in the domain, especially in the use of deep learning. The main challenges include implementing the proposed methods in a production environment, incorporating them into maintenance plans, and enhancing the accessibility and reproducibility of the research.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is one of the most intensively developed are of AI in recent years. It is also one of the most fragmented one with multiple methods that focus on different aspects of explanations. This makes difficult to obtain the full spectrum of explanation at once in a compact and consistent way. To address this issue, we present Local Universal Explainer (LUX) that is a rule-based explainer which can generate factual, counterfactual and visual explanations. It is based on a modified version of decision tree algorithms that allows for oblique splits and integration with feature importance XAI methods such as SHAP or LIME. It does not use data generation in opposite to other algorithms, but is focused on selecting local concepts in a form of high-density clusters of real data that have the highest impact on forming the decision boundary of the explained model. We tested our method on real and synthetic datasets and compared it with state-of-the-art rule-based explainers such as LORE, EXPLAN and Anchor. Our method outperforms currently existing approaches in terms of simplicity, global fidelity and representativeness.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) fills the role of a critical interface fostering interactions between sophisticated intelligent systems and diverse individuals, including data scientists, domain experts, end-users, and more. It aids in deciphering the intricate internal mechanisms of ``black box'' Machine Learning (ML), rendering the reasons behind their decisions more understandable. However, current research in XAI primarily focuses on two aspects; ways to facilitate user trust, or to debug and refine the ML model. The majority of it falls short of recognising the diverse types of explanations needed in broader contexts, as different users and varied application areas necessitate solutions tailored to their specific needs. One such domain is Predictive Maintenance (PdM), an exploding area of research under the Industry 4.0 \& 5.0 umbrella. This position paper highlights the gap between existing XAI methodologies and the specific requirements for explanations within industrial applications, particularly the Predictive Maintenance field. Despite explainability's crucial role, this subject remains a relatively under-explored area, making this paper a pioneering attempt to bring relevant challenges to the research community's attention. We provide an overview of predictive maintenance tasks and accentuate the need and varying purposes for corresponding explanations. We then list and describe XAI techniques commonly employed in the literature, discussing their suitability for PdM tasks. Finally, to make the ideas and claims more concrete, we demonstrate XAI applied in four specific industrial use cases: commercial vehicles, metro trains, steel plants, and wind farms, spotlighting areas requiring further research.

Pattern discovery in multidimensional data sets has been a subject of research since decades. There exists a wide spectrum of clustering algorithms that can be used for that purpose. However, their practical applications share in common the post-clustering phase, which concerns expert-based interpretation and analysis of the obtained results. We argue that this can be a bottleneck of the process, especially in the cases where domain knowledge exists prior to clustering. Such a situation requires not only a proper analysis of automatically discovered clusters, but also a conformance checking with existing knowledge. In this work, we present Knowledge Augmented Clustering (KnAC), which main goal is to confront expert-based labelling with automated clustering for the sake of updating and refining the former. Our solution does not depend on any ready clustering algorithm, nor introduce one. Instead KnAC can serve as an augmentation of an arbitrary clustering algorithm, making the approach robust and model-agnostic. We demonstrate the feasibility of our method on artificially, reproducible examples and on a real life use case scenario.

The paper describes BIRAFFE2 data set, which is a result of an affective computing experiment conducted between 2019 and 2020, that aimed to develop computer models for classification and recognition of emotion. Such work is important to develop new methods of natural Human-AI interaction. As we believe that models of emotion should be personalized by design, we present an unified paradigm allowing to capture emotional responses of different persons, taking individual personality differences into account. We combine classical psychological paradigms of emotional response collection with the newer approach, based on the observation of the computer game player. By capturing ones psycho-physiological reactions (ECG, EDA signal recording), mimic expressions (facial emotion recognition), subjective valence-arousal balance ratings (widget ratings) and gameplay progression (accelerometer and screencast recording), we provide a framework that can be easily used and developed for the purpose of the machine learning methods.