Author Archives: Ryan Watkins

Explanations are hypothesized to improve human understanding of machine learning models and achieve a variety of desirable outcomes, ranging from model debugging to enhancing human decision making. However, empirical studies have found mixed and even negative results. An open question, … Continued

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as machine learning algorithms, have allowed scientists, marketers and governments to shed light on correlations that remained invisible until now. Beforehand, the dots that we had to connect in order to imagine a new knowledge … Continued

Ensuring fairness of machine learning (ML) algorithms is becoming an increasingly important mission for ML service providers. This is even more critical and challenging in the federated learning (FL) scenario, given a large number of diverse participating clients. Simply mandating … Continued

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy preserving machine learning scheme, where training happens with data federated across devices and not leaving them to sustain user privacy. This is ensured by making the untrained or partially trained models to reach directly … Continued

Interaction and cooperation with humans are overarching aspirations of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Recent studies demonstrate that AI agents trained with deep reinforcement learning are capable of collaborating with humans. These studies primarily evaluate human compatibility through “objective” metrics such … Continued

It has been the historic responsibility of the social sciences to investigate human societies. Fulfilling this responsibility requires social theories, measurement models and social data. Most existing theories and measurement models in the social sciences were not developed with the deep … Continued

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human-algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration … Continued

Building artificial intelligence (AI) that aligns with human values is an unsolved problem. Here, we developed a human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI, in which reinforcement learning is used to design a social mechanism that humans prefer by majority. A … Continued

While a lot of research in explainable AI focuses on producing effective explanations, less work is devoted to the question of how people understand and interpret the explanation. In this work, we focus on this question through a study of … Continued