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A Gray Literature Study on Fairness Requirements in AI-enabled Software Engineering

Nguyen, Thanh, Boufaied, Chaima, Santos, Ronnie de Souza

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Today, with the growing obsession with applying Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Machine Learning (ML), to software across various contexts, much of the focus has been on the effectiveness of AI models, often measured through common metrics such as F1- score, while fairness receives relatively little attention. This paper presents a review of existing gray literature, examining fairness requirements in AI context, with a focus on how they are defined across various application domains, managed throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and the causes, as well as the corresponding consequences of their violation by AI models. Our gray literature investigation shows various definitions of fairness requirements in AI systems, commonly emphasizing non-discrimination and equal treatment across different demographic and social attributes. Fairness requirement management practices vary across the SDLC, particularly in model training and bias mitigation, fairness monitoring and evaluation, and data handling practices. Fairness requirement violations are frequently linked, but not limited, to data representation bias, algorithmic and model design bias, human judgment, and evaluation and transparency gaps. The corresponding consequences include harm in a broad sense, encompassing specific professional and societal impacts as key examples, stereotype reinforcement, data and privacy risks, and loss of trust and legitimacy in AI-supported decisions. These findings emphasize the need for consistent frameworks and practices to integrate fairness into AI software, paying as much attention to fairness as to effectiveness.


eACGM: Non-instrumented Performance Tracing and Anomaly Detection towards Machine Learning Systems

Xu, Ruilin, Xie, Zongxuan, Chen, Pengfei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--We present eACGM, a full-stack AI/ML system monitoring framework based on eBPF . Additionally, it leverages libnvml to gather process-level GPU resource usage information. By applying a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to the collected multidimensional performance metrics for statistical modeling and clustering analysis, eACGM effectively identifies complex failure modes, such as latency anomalies, hardware failures, and communication inefficiencies, enabling rapid diagnosis of system bottlenecks and abnormal behaviors. T o evaluate eACGM's effectiveness and practicality, we conducted extensive empirical studies and case analyses in multi-node distributed training scenarios. The results demonstrate that eACGM, while maintaining a non-intrusive and low-overhead profile, successfully captures critical performance anomalies during model training and inference.


Learning About Algorithm Auditing in Five Steps: Scaffolding How High School Youth Can Systematically and Critically Evaluate Machine Learning Applications

Morales-Navarro, Luis, Kafai, Yasmin B., Vogelstein, Lauren, Yu, Evelyn, Metaxa, Danaë

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While there is widespread interest in supporting young people to critically evaluate machine learning-powered systems, there is little research on how we can support them in inquiring about how these systems work and what their limitations and implications may be. Outside of K-12 education, an effective strategy in evaluating black-boxed systems is algorithm auditing-a method for understanding algorithmic systems' opaque inner workings and external impacts from the outside in. In this paper, we review how expert researchers conduct algorithm audits and how end users engage in auditing practices to propose five steps that, when incorporated into learning activities, can support young people in auditing algorithms. We present a case study of a team of teenagers engaging with each step during an out-of-school workshop in which they audited peer-designed generative AI TikTok filters. We discuss the kind of scaffolds we provided to support youth in algorithm auditing and directions and challenges for integrating algorithm auditing into classroom activities. This paper contributes: (a) a conceptualization of five steps to scaffold algorithm auditing learning activities, and (b) examples of how youth engaged with each step during our pilot study.


Navigating Fairness: Practitioners' Understanding, Challenges, and Strategies in AI/ML Development

Pant, Aastha, Hoda, Rashina, Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit, Turhan, Burak

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rise in the use of AI/ML applications across industries has sparked more discussions about the fairness of AI/ML in recent times. While prior research on the fairness of AI/ML exists, there is a lack of empirical studies focused on understanding the views and experiences of AI practitioners in developing a fair AI/ML. Understanding AI practitioners' views and experiences on the fairness of AI/ML is important because they are directly involved in its development and deployment and their insights can offer valuable real-world perspectives on the challenges associated with ensuring fairness in AI/ML. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 AI practitioners to investigate their understanding of what a 'fair AI/ML' is, the challenges they face in developing a fair AI/ML, the consequences of developing an unfair AI/ML, and the strategies they employ to ensure AI/ML fairness. We developed a framework showcasing the relationship between AI practitioners' understanding of 'fair AI/ML' and (i) their challenges in its development, (ii) the consequences of developing an unfair AI/ML, and (iii) strategies used to ensure AI/ML fairness. Additionally, we also identify areas for further investigation and offer recommendations to aid AI practitioners and AI companies in navigating fairness.


Resolving Ethics Trade-offs in Implementing Responsible AI

Sanderson, Conrad, Schleiger, Emma, Douglas, David, Kuhnert, Petra, Lu, Qinghua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While the operationalisation of high-level AI ethics principles into practical AI/ML systems has made progress, there is still a theory-practice gap in managing tensions between the underlying AI ethics aspects. We cover five approaches for addressing the tensions via trade-offs, ranging from rudimentary to complex. The approaches differ in the types of considered context, scope, methods for measuring contexts, and degree of justification. None of the approaches is likely to be appropriate for all organisations, systems, or applications. To address this, we propose a framework which consists of: (i) proactive identification of tensions, (ii) prioritisation and weighting of ethics aspects, (iii) justification and documentation of trade-off decisions. The proposed framework aims to facilitate the implementation of well-rounded AI/ML systems that are appropriate for potential regulatory requirements.


Implementing Responsible AI: Tensions and Trade-Offs Between Ethics Aspects

Sanderson, Conrad, Douglas, David, Lu, Qinghua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many sets of ethics principles for responsible AI have been proposed to allay concerns about misuse and abuse of AI/ML systems. The underlying aspects of such sets of principles include privacy, accuracy, fairness, robustness, explainability, and transparency. However, there are potential tensions between these aspects that pose difficulties for AI/ML developers seeking to follow these principles. For example, increasing the accuracy of an AI/ML system may reduce its explainability. As part of the ongoing effort to operationalise the principles into practice, in this work we compile and discuss a catalogue of 10 notable tensions, trade-offs and other interactions between the underlying aspects. We primarily focus on two-sided interactions, drawing on support spread across a diverse literature. This catalogue can be helpful in raising awareness of the possible interactions between aspects of ethics principles, as well as facilitating well-supported judgements by the designers and developers of AI/ML systems.


Council Post: Economic Aspect of sustainable development goals and how data science and analytics can be used

#artificialintelligence

One of the rudimentary aspects of sustainable development is to be fair to the future generations by leaving a better, or if not a similar, resource foundation that we inherited. Though it is a global priority, its implementation is vulnerable to high costs. This begs the question whether the implementation of SDGs makes sense economically. The implementation of SDGs is a prime global concern with economic tools and sustainable finance choices. It is becoming crucial to reduce costs which are being carried out in the 2030 agenda by overcoming financial gaps for socioeconomic and environmental challenges.


Integrated multimodal artificial intelligence framework for healthcare applications

Soenksen, Luis R., Ma, Yu, Zeng, Cynthia, Boussioux, Leonard D. J., Carballo, Kimberly Villalobos, Na, Liangyuan, Wiberg, Holly M., Li, Michael L., Fuentes, Ignacio, Bertsimas, Dimitris

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems hold great promise to improve healthcare over the next decades. Specifically, AI systems leveraging multiple data sources and input modalities are poised to become a viable method to deliver more accurate results and deployable pipelines across a wide range of applications. In this work, we propose and evaluate a unified Holistic AI in Medicine (HAIM) framework to facilitate the generation and testing of AI systems that leverage multimodal inputs. Our approach uses generalizable data pre-processing and machine learning modeling stages that can be readily adapted for research and deployment in healthcare environments. We evaluate our HAIM framework by training and characterizing 14,324 independent models based on HAIM-MIMIC-MM, a multimodal clinical database (N=34,537 samples) containing 7,279 unique hospitalizations and 6,485 patients, spanning all possible input combinations of 4 data modalities (i.e., tabular, time-series, text, and images), 11 unique data sources and 12 predictive tasks. We show that this framework can consistently and robustly produce models that outperform similar single-source approaches across various healthcare demonstrations (by 6-33%), including 10 distinct chest pathology diagnoses, along with length-of-stay and 48-hour mortality predictions. We also quantify the contribution of each modality and data source using Shapley values, which demonstrates the heterogeneity in data modality importance and the necessity of multimodal inputs across different healthcare-relevant tasks. The generalizable properties and flexibility of our Holistic AI in Medicine (HAIM) framework could offer a promising pathway for future multimodal predictive systems in clinical and operational healthcare settings.


Some cloud-based AI systems are returning to on-premises data centers

#artificialintelligence

As a concept, artificial intelligence is very old. My first job out of college almost 40 years ago was as an AI systems developer using Lisp. Many of the concepts from back then are still in use today. However, it's about a thousand times less expensive now to build, deploy, and operate AI systems for any number of business purposes. Cloud computing revolutionized AI and machine learning, not because the hyperscalers invented it but because they made it affordable.


How to use data governance for AI/ML systems

#artificialintelligence

Data governance assures that data is available, consistent, usable, trusted and secure. It is a concept that organizations struggle with, and the ante is upped when big data and systems like artificial intelligence and machine language enter the picture. Organizations quickly realize that AI/ML systems function differently from traditional, fixed record systems. With AI/ML, the objective isn't to return a value or a status for a single transaction. Rather, an AI/ML system sifts through petabytes of data seeking answers to a query or an algorithm that might even seem to be a little open ended.