skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Charting the Sociotechnical Gap in Explainable AI: A Framework to Address the Gap in XAI
Explainable AI (XAI) systems are sociotechnical in nature; thus, they are subject to the sociotechnical gap-divide between the technical affordances and the social needs. However, charting this gap is challenging. In the context of XAI, we argue that charting the gap improves our problem understanding, which can reflexively provide actionable insights to improve explainability. Utilizing two case studies in distinct domains, we empirically derive a framework that facilitates systematic charting of the sociotechnical gap by connecting AI guidelines in the context of XAI and elucidating how to use them to address the gap. We apply the framework to a third case in a new domain, showcasing its affordances. Finally, we discuss conceptual implications of the framework, share practical considerations in its operationalization, and offer guidance on transferring it to new contexts. By making conceptual and practical contributions to understanding the sociotechnical gap in XAI, the framework expands the XAI design space.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1928586
PAR ID:
10434402
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume:
7
Issue:
CSCW1
ISSN:
2573-0142
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 32
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) involves sharing intimate content without the depicted person's consent, including 'revenge porn' and sexually explicit deepfakes. While NCIM has received attention in legal, psychological, and communication fields over the past decade, it is not sufficiently addressed in computing scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by linking NCIM harms to the specific technological components that facilitate them. We introduce thesociotechnical stack, a conceptual framework designed to map the technical stack to its corresponding social impacts. The sociotechnical stack allows us to analyze sociotechnical problems like NCIM, and points toward opportunities for computing research. We propose a research roadmap for computing and social computing communities to deter NCIM perpetration and support victim-survivors through building and rebuilding technologies. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract Neural network architectures are achieving superhuman performance on an expanding range of tasks. To effectively and safely deploy these systems, their decision‐making must be understandable to a wide range of stakeholders. Methods to explain artificial intelligence (AI) have been proposed to answer this challenge, but a lack of theory impedes the development of systematic abstractions, which are necessary for cumulative knowledge gains. We propose Bayesian Teaching as a framework for unifying explainable AI (XAI) by integrating machine learning and human learning. Bayesian Teaching formalizes explanation as a communication act of an explainer to shift the beliefs of an explainee. This formalization decomposes a wide range of XAI methods into four components: (a) the target inference, (b) the explanation, (c) the explainee model, and (d) the explainer model. The abstraction afforded by Bayesian Teaching to decompose XAI methods elucidates the invariances among them. The decomposition of XAI systems enables modular validation, as each of the first three components listed can be tested semi‐independently. This decomposition also promotes generalization through recombination of components from different XAI systems, which facilitates the generation of novel variants. These new variants need not be evaluated one by one provided that each component has been validated, leading to an exponential decrease in development time. Finally, by making the goal of explanation explicit, Bayesian Teaching helps developers to assess how suitable an XAI system is for its intended real‐world use case. Thus, Bayesian Teaching provides a theoretical framework that encourages systematic, scientific investigation of XAI. 
    more » « less
  3. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have advanced significantly in recent years, progressively evolving into artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of solving complex, human-like intellectual challenges. Despite the advancements, the interpretability of these sophisticated models lags behind, with many ML architectures remaining black boxes that are too intricate and expansive for human interpretation. Recognizing this issue, there has been a revived interest in the field of explainable AI (XAI) aimed at explaining these opaque ML models. However, XAI tools often suffer from being tightly coupled with the underlying ML models and are inefficient due to redundant computations. We introduce provenance-enabled explainable AI (PXAI). PXAI decouples XAI computation from ML models through a provenance graph that tracks the creation and transformation of all data within the model. PXAI improves XAI computational efficiency by excluding irrelevant and insignificant variables and computation in the provenance graph. Through various case studies, we demonstrate how PXAI enhances computational efficiency when interpreting complex ML models, confirming its potential as a valuable tool in the field of XAI. 
    more » « less
  4. Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology that has great potential in reducing energy consumption, environmental burdens, and operational risks of chemical production. However, large-scale applications of AI are still limited. One barrier is the lack of quantitative understandings of the potential benefits and risks of different AI applications. This study reviewed relevant AI literature and categorized those case studies by application types, impact categories, and application modes. Most studies assessed the energy, economic, and safety implications of AI applications, while few of them have evaluated the environmental impacts of AI, given the large data gaps and difficulties in choosing appropriate assessment methods. Based on the reviewed case studies in the chemical industry, we proposed a conceptual framework that encompasses approaches from industrial ecology, economics, and engineering to guide the selection of performance indicators and evaluation methods for a holistic assessment of AI's impacts. This framework could be a valuable tool to support the decision-making related to AI in the fundamental research and practical production of chemicals. Although this study focuses on the chemical industry, the insights of the literature review and the proposed framework could be applied to AI applications in other industries and broad industrial ecology fields. In the end, this study highlights future research directions for addressing the data challenges in assessing AI's impacts and developing AI-enhanced tools to support the sustainable development of the chemical industry. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Recent advances in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods show promise for understanding predictions made by machine learning (ML) models. XAI explains how the input features are relevant or important for the model predictions. We train linear regression (LR) and convolutional neural network (CNN) models to make 1-day predictions of sea ice velocity in the Arctic from inputs of present-day wind velocity and previous-day ice velocity and concentration. We apply XAI methods to the CNN and compare explanations to variance explained by LR. We confirm the feasibility of using a novel XAI method [i.e., global layerwise relevance propagation (LRP)] to understand ML model predictions of sea ice motion by comparing it to established techniques. We investigate a suite of linear, perturbation-based, and propagation-based XAI methods in both local and global forms. Outputs from different explainability methods are generally consistent in showing that wind speed is the input feature with the highest contribution to ML predictions of ice motion, and we discuss inconsistencies in the spatial variability of the explanations. Additionally, we show that the CNN relies on both linear and nonlinear relationships between the inputs and uses nonlocal information to make predictions. LRP shows that wind speed over land is highly relevant for predicting ice motion offshore. This provides a framework to show how knowledge of environmental variables (i.e., wind) on land could be useful for predicting other properties (i.e., sea ice velocity) elsewhere. Significance StatementExplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is useful for understanding predictions made by machine learning models. Our research establishes trustability in a novel implementation of an explainable AI method known as layerwise relevance propagation for Earth science applications. To do this, we provide a comparative evaluation of a suite of explainable AI methods applied to machine learning models that make 1-day predictions of Arctic sea ice velocity. We use explainable AI outputs to understand how the input features are used by the machine learning to predict ice motion. Additionally, we show that a convolutional neural network uses nonlinear and nonlocal information in making its predictions. We take advantage of the nonlocality to investigate the extent to which knowledge of wind on land is useful for predicting sea ice velocity elsewhere. 
    more » « less