The Endless Tuning is a design method for a reliable deployment of artificial intelligence based on a double mirroring process, which pursues both the goals of avoiding human replacement and filling the so-called responsibility gap (Matthias 2004). Originally depicted in (Fabris et al. 2024) and ensuing the relational approach urged therein, it was then actualized in a protocol, implemented in three prototypical applications regarding decision-making processes (respectively: loan granting, pneumonia diagnosis, and art style recognition) and tested with such as many domain experts. Step by step illustrating the protocol, giving insights concretely showing a different voice (Gilligan 1993) in the ethics of artificial intelligence, a philosophical account of technical choices (e.g., a reversed and hermeneutic deployment of XAI algorithms) will be provided in the present study together with the results of the experiments, focusing on user experience rather than statistical accuracy. Even thoroughly employing deep learning models, full control was perceived by the interviewees in the decision-making setting, while it appeared that a bridge can be built between accountability and liability in case of damage.

Migrating a set of software variants into a software product line (SPL) is an expensive and potentially challenging endeavor. Indeed, SPL engineering can significantly impact a company's development process and often requires changes to established developer practices. The work presented in this paper stems from a collaboration with a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that decided to migrate its existing code base into an SPL. In this study, we conducted an in-depth evaluation of the company's current development processes and practices, as well as the anticipated benefits and risks associated with the migration. Key stakeholders involved in software development participated in this evaluation to provide insight into their perceptions of the migration and their potential resistance to change. This paper describes the design of the interviews conducted with these stakeholders and presents an analysis of the results. Among the qualitative findings, we observed that all participants, regardless of their role in the development process, identified benefits of the migration relevant to their own activities. Furthermore, our results suggest that an effective risk mitigation strategy involves keeping stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the process, preserving as many good practices as possible, and actively involving them in the migration to ensure a smooth transition and minimize potential challenges.

With the ever-growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), AI-based software and its negative impact on the environment are no longer negligible, and studying and mitigating this impact has become a critical area of research. However, it is currently unclear which role environmental sustainability plays during AI adoption in industry and how AI regulations influence Green AI practices and decision-making in industry. We therefore aim to investigate the Green AI perception and management of industry practitioners. To this end, we conducted a total of 11 interviews with participants from 10 different organizations that adopted AI-based software. The interviews explored three main themes: AI adoption, current efforts in mitigating the negative environmental impact of AI, and the influence of the EU AI Act and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Our findings indicate that 9 of 11 participants prioritized business efficiency during AI adoption, with minimal consideration of environmental sustainability. Monitoring and mitigation of AI's environmental impact were very limited. Only one participant monitored negative environmental effects. Regarding applied mitigation practices, six participants reported no actions, with the others sporadically mentioning techniques like prompt engineering, relying on smaller models, or not overusing AI. Awareness and compliance with the EU AI Act are low, with only one participant reporting on its influence, while the CSRD drove sustainability reporting efforts primarily in larger companies. All in all, our findings reflect a lack of urgency and priority for sustainable AI among these companies. We suggest that current regulations are not very effective, which has implications for policymakers. Additionally, there is a need to raise industry awareness, but also to provide user-friendly techniques and tools for Green AI practices.

Applications of artificial intelligence or machine learning in research Modes of use Surrogate modeling for physics - based models Modeling of poorly understood phenomena Data preprocessing Large language model use Applications AI/ML as research tool Production process design, monitoring, & output prediction Part design & properties prediction Materials design & properties prediction AI/ML as research product Generative AI design tool for consumers Generic research tasks Large language models for coding Large language models for literature review Benefits of artificial intelligence or machine learning in research Reduction in accuracy/cost/speed trade - off in research, especially computer modeling Reduced computation time Replacing experimentation Reducing need for computationally intensive, physics - based models Saving research labor Exploring larger design spaces Address of previously unsolvable problems Model poorly understood relationships between variables Identify human - unidentifiable patterns or phenomena Downsides of artificial intelligence or machine learning in research Accuracy weaknesses Predict poorly outside regions of dense, high - quality training data Interpretability weaknesses Bounds of accuracy can be unclear Accuracy assessment can be difficult Long - run scientific progress concerns AI/ML cannot develop novel scientific theory AI/ML may bypass opportunities to identify empirical or theoretical novelties Resource issues Data acquisition and cleaning is time - intensive AI/ML models are computation - and energy - intensive to develop Inappropriate use issues Easy to over - trust May be inappropriately used to address problems soluble with simpler methods 8 Second, AI/ML models can be trained on input and output data for phenomena (e.g., complex production processes) which lack robust theoretical models, developing novel predictive capabilities in the absence of explicit, human - designed theory. This is somet imes referred to as "phenomenological modeling," as it attempts to model phenomena in the absence of mechanistic, explanatory understanding: [T]he first reason we choose to use AI is because we don't have a good model of what our system is. . . I get a bunch of data coming in and I have a bunch of sensor readings, you know. . . And I use the AI to map the bunch of sensor readings to the process health or process status or machine status that I have.

We present MimiTalk, a dual-agent constitutional AI framework designed for scalable and ethical conversational data collection in social science research. The framework integrates a supervisor model for strategic oversight and a conversational model for question generation. We conducted three studies: Study 1 evaluated usability with 20 participants; Study 2 compared 121 AI interviews to 1,271 human interviews from the MediaSum dataset using NLP metrics and propensity score matching; Study 3 involved 10 interdisciplinary researchers conducting both human and AI interviews, followed by blind thematic analysis. Results across studies indicate that MimiTalk reduces interview anxiety, maintains conversational coherence, and outperforms human interviews in information richness, coherence, and stability. AI interviews elicit technical insights and candid views on sensitive topics, while human interviews better capture cultural and emotional nuances. These findings suggest that dual-agent constitutional AI supports effective human-AI collaboration, enabling replicable, scalable and quality-controlled qualitative research.

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a wide range of downstream generative applications. However, we found that they also risk perpetuating subtle fairness issues tied to culture, positioning their generations from the perspectives of the mainstream US culture while demonstrating salient externality towards non-mainstream ones. In this work, we identify and systematically investigate this novel culture positioning bias, in which an LLM's default generative stance aligns with a mainstream view and treats other cultures as outsiders. We propose the CultureLens benchmark with 4000 generation prompts and 3 evaluation metrics for quantifying this bias through the lens of a culturally situated interview script generation task, in which an LLM is positioned as an onsite reporter interviewing local people across 10 diverse cultures. Empirical evaluation on 5 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals a stark pattern: while models adopt insider tones in over 88 percent of US-contexted scripts on average, they disproportionately adopt mainly outsider stances for less dominant cultures. To resolve these biases, we propose 2 inference-time mitigation methods: a baseline prompt-based Fairness Intervention Pillars (FIP) method, and a structured Mitigation via Fairness Agents (MFA) framework consisting of 2 pipelines: (1) MFA-SA (Single-Agent) introduces a self-reflection and rewriting loop based on fairness guidelines. (2) MFA-MA (Multi-Agent) structures the process into a hierarchy of specialized agents: a Planner Agent(initial script generation), a Critique Agent (evaluates initial script against fairness pillars), and a Refinement Agent (incorporates feedback to produce a polished, unbiased script). Empirical results showcase the effectiveness of agent-based methods as a promising direction for mitigating biases in generative LLMs.

The rapid progress of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has spurred the creation of numerous benchmarks. However, conventional full-coverage Question-Answering evaluations suffer from high redundancy and low efficiency. Inspired by human interview processes, we propose a multi-to-one interview paradigm for efficient MLLM evaluation. Our framework consists of (i) a two-stage interview strategy with pre-interview and formal interview phases, (ii) dynamic adjustment of interviewer weights to ensure fairness, and (iii) an adaptive mechanism for question difficulty-level chosen. Experiments on different benchmarks show that the proposed paradigm achieves significantly higher correlation with full-coverage results than random sampling, with improvements of up to 17.6% in PLCC and 16.7% in SRCC, while reducing the number of required questions. These findings demonstrate that the proposed paradigm provides a reliable and efficient alternative for large-scale MLLM benchmarking.

Participatory AI, in which impacted community members and other stakeholders are involved in the design and development of AI systems, holds promise as a way to ensure AI is developed to meet their needs and reflect their values. However, the process of identifying, reaching out, and engaging with all relevant stakeholder groups, which we refer to as recruitment methodology, is still a practical challenge in AI projects striving to adopt participatory practices. In this paper, we investigate the challenges that researchers face when designing and executing recruitment methodology for Participatory AI projects, and the implications of current recruitment practice for Participatory AI. First, we describe the recruitment methodologies used in AI projects using a corpus of 37 projects to capture the diversity of practices in the field and perform an initial analysis on the documentation of recruitment practices, as well as specific strategies that researchers use to meet goals of equity and empowerment. To complement this analysis, we interview five AI researchers to learn about the outcomes of recruitment methodologies. We find that these outcomes are shaped by structural conditions of their work, researchers' own goals and expectations, and the relationships built from the recruitment methodology and subsequent collaboration. Based on these analyses, we provide recommendations for designing and executing relationship-forward recruitment methods, as well as reflexive recruitment documentation practices for Participatory AI researchers.

Standard single-turn, static benchmarks fall short in evaluating the nuanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex tasks such as software engineering. In this work, we propose a novel interactive evaluation framework that assesses LLMs on multi-requirement programming tasks through structured, feedback-driven dialogue. Each task is modeled as a requirement dependency graph, and an ``interviewer'' LLM, aware of the ground-truth solution, provides minimal, targeted hints to an ``interviewee'' model to help correct errors and fulfill target constraints. This dynamic protocol enables fine-grained diagnostic insights into model behavior, uncovering strengths and systematic weaknesses that static benchmarks fail to measure. We build on DevAI, a benchmark of 55 curated programming tasks, by adding ground-truth solutions and evaluating the relevance and utility of interviewer hints through expert annotation. Our results highlight the importance of dynamic evaluation in advancing the development of collaborative code-generating agents.

The field of explainable natural language processing (NLP) has grown rapidly in recent years. The growing opacity of complex models calls for transparency and explanations of their decisions, which is crucial to understand their reasoning and facilitate deployment, especially in high-stakes environments. Despite increasing attention given to explainable NLP, practitioners' perspectives regarding its practical adoption and effectiveness remain underexplored. This paper addresses this research gap by investigating practitioners' experiences with explainability methods, specifically focusing on their motivations for adopting such methods, the techniques employed, satisfaction levels, and the practical challenges encountered in real-world NLP applications. Through a qualitative interview-based study with industry practitioners and complementary interviews with academic researchers, we systematically analyze and compare their perspectives. Our findings reveal conceptual gaps, low satisfaction with current explainability methods, and highlight evaluation challenges. Our findings emphasize the need for clear definitions and user-centric frameworks for better adoption of explainable NLP in practice.