Responsible AI Seminar: Explainable artificial intelligence: Beware the inmates running the asylum. Or: How I learnt to stop worrying and love the social and behavioural sciences.
Abstract: In his book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and how to Restore the Sanity,” Alan Cooper argues that a major reason why software is often poorly designed (from a user perspective) is that programmers are in charge. As a result, programmers design software that works for themselves, rather than for their target audience; a phenomenon he refers to as the ‘inmates running the asylum’. In this talk, I will argue that the field of explainable AI risks a similar fate if AI researchers and practitioners do not take a cross-disciplinary approach to explainable AI. I will present an overview of the intersection of explainable AI and will present some key examples of how to integrate social science knowledge into these methods.
Tim is a professor of computer science in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, and Co-Director for the Centre of AI and Digital Ethics. His primary area of expertise is in artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on human-AI interaction and collaboration and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). His work is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, interaction design, and cognitive science/psychology.