The law is typically a natural-language-based domain, and natural-language texts are pervasive in the law. First, natural language is the medium that legislation (including administrative regulations of all kinds) uses to express legal prescriptions, which humans (both experts and laypeople) are assumed to understand and comply with. Legislative and regulatory bodies have produced complex and evolving networks of natural language texts, which have complex structures and interconnections and use diverse terminologies to express technical and non-technical content. Second, natural language is used in judicial proceedings and opinions. In a proceeding, the parties to a legal case rely on natural language to express their arguments, motions, and claims, as do witnesses in their testimonies.

New Zealand is developing an approach to supporting the ethical adoption of AI -- one that is focused on building an AI ecosystem on a foundation of trust, equity and accessibility right from the onset. A crucial part of this approach is to involve key stakeholders in the planning. And that is exactly the reason why the government has designed the system so every New Zealander and every technology expert who matters can contribute. The success of this ITP requires us to form a consensus view on the scope of our ambition and how this can be achieved with actions and initiatives that are sufficiently realistic to bring about meaningful change – both short and longer-term. Wellington published a draft that should jumpstart its pursuit of an ethical AI ecosystem: the Industry Transformation Plan (ITP) which covers its overall digital transformation road map.

I find the activity of codifying and comparing various interpretations of a particular process in the pursuit of strengthening one's own interpretation of said process to be a worthy one. I have previously done so with alternate interpretations of what we could call the machine learning process (and which could reasonably be closely aligned with the data science or data mining processes, at least to some degree), of which you can find examples here and here and here. These previous posts have considered the classic CRISP-DM model, the KDD Process, Francois Chollet's 4 step model (aimed at Keras, but generalizable), Yufeng Guo's 7 steps to machine learning, and even modifications aimed specifically at more narrow disciplines, such as the text-based data science task framework. In an effort to further refine our internal models, this post will present an overview of Aurélien Géron's Machine Learning Project Checklist, as seen in his bestselling book, "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow." It's a similar approach to that of, say, Guo's 7 step process, but at a subtly higher level; it's presented as a checklist of approaching projects, and so it feels less prescriptive and more descriptive, a reminder of what you should be doing as you do it as opposed to some grand explanation of why you are doing what you are doing.

They are becoming more sophisticated, useful, and pervasive. Owing in part to the rapid advancement of powerful algorithms, AI has created not only new business opportunities worldwide, but also concerns from consumers, policymakers anddevelopers of the technology. These concerns need to be addressed. In fact, practitioners of data science, big data, and machine learning have been actively addressing social and ethical concerns that pertain to our increasingly algorithmic society. Can learning algorithms be designed to be fair?

This paper discusses an interested party who wishes to influence the behavior of agents in a game (multi-agent interaction), which is not under his control. The interested party cannot design a new game, cannot enforce agents' behavior, cannot enforce payments by the agents, and cannot prohibit strategies available to the agents. However, he can influence the outcome of the game by committing to non-negative monetary transfers for the different strategy profiles that may be selected by the agents. The interested party assumes that agents are rational in the commonly agreed sense that they do not use dominated strategies. Hence, a certain subset of outcomes is implemented in a given game if by adding non-negative payments, rational players will necessarily produce an outcome in this subset. Obviously, by making sufficiently big payments one can implement any desirable outcome. The question is what is the cost of implementation? In this paper we introduce the notion of k-implementation of a desired set of strategy profiles, where k stands for the amount of payment that need to be actually made in order to implement desirable outcomes. A major point in k-implementation is that monetary offers need not necessarily materialize when following desired behaviors. We define and study k-implementation in the contexts of games with complete and incomplete information. In the latter case we mainly focus on the VCG games. Our setting is later extended to deal with mixed strategies using correlation devices. Together, the paper introduces and studies the implementation of desirable outcomes by a reliable party who cannot modify game rules (i.e. provide protocols), complementing previous work in mechanism design, while making it more applicable to many realistic CS settings.

The problem of environment design considers a setting in which an interested party aims to influence an agent's decisions by making limited changes to the agent's environment.  Zhang and Parkes [2008] first introduced the environment design concept for a specific problem in the Markov Decision Process setting. In this paper, we present a general framework for the formulation and solution of environment design problems. We consider both the case in which the agent's local decision model is known and partially unknown to the interested party, and illustrate the framework and results on a linear programming setting.  For the latter problem, we formulate an active, indirect elicitation method and provide conditions for convergence and logarithmic convergence. We relate to the problem of inverse optimization and also offer a game-theoretic interpretation of our methods.

This paper discusses an interested party who wishes to influence the behavior of agents in a game (multi-agent interaction), which is not under his control. The interested party cannot design a new game, cannot enforce agents' behavior, cannot enforce payments by the agents, and cannot prohibit strategies available to the agents. However, he can influence the outcome of the game by committing to non-negative monetary transfers for the different strategy profiles that may be selected by the agents. The interested party assumes that agents are rational in the commonly agreed sense that they do not use dominated strategies. Hence, a certain subset of outcomes is implemented in a given game if by adding non-negative payments, rational players will necessarily produce an outcome in this subset. Obviously, by making sufficiently big payments one can implement any desirable outcome. The question is what is the cost of implementation? In this paper we introduce the notion of k-implementation of a desired set of strategy profiles, where k stands for the amount of payment that need to be actually made in order to implement desirable outcomes. A major point in k-implementation is that monetary offers need not necessarily materialize when following desired behaviors. We define and study k-implementation in the contexts of games with complete and incomplete information. In the latter case we mainly focus on the VCG games. Our setting is later extended to deal with mixed strategies using correlation devices. Together, the paper introduces and studies the implementation of desirable outcomes by a reliable party who cannot modify game rules (i.e. provide protocols), complementing previous work in mechanism design, while making it more applicable to many realistic CS settings.