Application of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to Surveillance Technology

This study offers an in-depth analysis of the application and implications of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Risk Management Framework (NIST AI RMF) within the domain of surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition technology. Given the inherently high-risk and consequential nature of facial recognition systems, our research emphasizes the critical need for a structured approach to risk management in this sector. The paper presents a detailed case study demonstrating the utility of the NIST AI RMF in identifying and mitigating risks that might otherwise remain unnoticed in these technologies. Our primary objective is to develop a comprehensive risk management strategy that advances the practice of responsible AI utilization in feasible, scalable ways. We propose a six-step process tailored to the specific challenges of surveillance technology that aims to produce a more systematic and effective risk management practice. This process emphasizes continual assessment and improvement to facilitate companies in managing AI-related risks more robustly and ensuring ethical and responsible deployment of AI systems. Additionally, our analysis uncovers and discusses critical gaps in the current framework of the NIST AI RMF, particularly concerning its application to surveillance technologies. These insights contribute to the evolving discourse on AI governance and risk management, highlighting areas for future refinement and development in frameworks like the NIST AI RMF.

Commercial AI, Conflict, and Moral Responsibility: A theoretical analysis and practical approach to the moral responsibilities associated with dual-use AI technology

This paper presents a theoretical analysis and practical approach to the moral responsibilities when developing AI systems for non-military applications that may nonetheless be used for conflict applications. We argue that AI represents a form of crossover technology that is different from previous historical examples of dual- or multi-use technology as it has a multiplicative effect across other technologies. As a result, existing analyses of ethical responsibilities around dual-use technologies do not necessarily work for AI systems. We instead argue that stakeholders involved in the AI system lifecycle are morally responsible for uses of their systems that are reasonably foreseeable. The core idea is that an agent's moral responsibility for some action is not necessarily determined by their intentions alone; we must also consider what the agent could reasonably have foreseen to be potential outcomes of their action, such as the potential use of a system in conflict even when it is not designed for that. In particular, we contend that it is reasonably foreseeable that: (1) civilian AI systems will be applied to active conflict, including conflict support activities, (2) the use of civilian AI systems in conflict will impact applications of the law of armed conflict, and (3) crossover AI technology will be applied to conflicts that fall short of armed conflict. Given these reasonably foreseeably outcomes, we present three technically feasible actions that developers of civilian AIs can take to potentially mitigate their moral responsibility: (a) establishing systematic approaches to multi-perspective capability testing, (b) integrating digital watermarking in model weight matrices, and (c) utilizing monitoring and reporting mechanisms for conflict-related AI applications.

Beyond Behaviorist Representational Harms: A Plan for Measurement and Mitigation

Algorithmic harms are commonly categorized as either allocative or representational. This study specifically addresses the latter, focusing on an examination of current definitions of representational harms to discern what is included and what is not. This analysis motivates our expansion beyond behavioral definitions to encompass harms to cognitive and affective states. The paper outlines high-level requirements for measurement: identifying the necessary expertise to implement this approach and illustrating it through a case study. Our work highlights the unique vulnerabilities of large language models to perpetrating representational harms, particularly when these harms go unmeasured and unmitigated. The work concludes by presenting proposed mitigations and delineating when to employ them. The overarching aim of this research is to establish a framework for broadening the definition of representational harms and to translate insights from fairness research into practical measurement and mitigation praxis.

Fairness Vs. Personalization: Towards Equity in Epistemic Utility

The applications of personalized recommender systems are rapidly expanding: encompassing social media, online shopping, search engine results, and more. These systems offer a more efficient way to navigate the vast array of items available. However, alongside this growth, there has been increased recognition of the potential for algorithmic systems to exhibit and perpetuate biases, risking unfairness in personalized domains. In this work, we explicate the inherent tension between personalization and conventional implementations of fairness. As an alternative, we propose equity to achieve fairness in the context of epistemic utility. We provide a mapping between goals and practical implementations and detail policy recommendations across key stakeholders to forge a path towards achieving fairness in personalized systems.

Constraint-Based Causal Structure Learning from Undersampled Graphs

Graphical structures estimated by causal learning algorithms from time series data can provide highly misleading causal information if the causal timescale of the generating process fails to match the measurement timescale of the data. Although this problem has been recently recognized, practitioners have limited resources to respond to it, and so must continue using models that they know are likely misleading. Existing methods either (a) require that the difference between causal and measurement timescales is known; or (b) can handle only very small number of random variables when the timescale difference is unknown; or (c) apply to only pairs of variables, though with fewer assumptions about prior knowledge; or (d) return impractically too many solutions. This paper addresses all four challenges. We combine constraint programming with both theoretical insights into the problem structure and prior information about admissible causal interactions. The resulting system provides a practical approach that scales to significantly larger sets (>100) of random variables, does not require precise knowledge of the timescale difference, supports edge misidentification and parametric connection strengths, and can provide the optimum choice among many possible solutions. The cumulative impact of these improvements is gain of multiple orders of magnitude in speed and informativeness.

Dynamic Certification for Autonomous Systems

Autonomous systems are often deployed in complex sociotechnical environments, such as public roads, where they must behave safely and securely. Unlike many traditionally engineered systems, autonomous systems are expected to behave predictably in varying "open world" environmental contexts that cannot be fully specified formally. As a result, assurance about autonomous systems requires us to develop new certification methods and mathematical tools that can bound the uncertainty engendered by these diverse deployment scenarios, rather than relying on static tools.

Causal Discovery from Subsampled Time Series Data by Constraint Optimization

This paper focuses on causal structure estimation from time series data in which measurements are obtained at a coarser timescale than the causal timescale of the underlying system. Previous work has shown that such subsampling can lead to significant errors about the system's causal structure if not properly taken into account. In this paper, we first consider the search for the system timescale causal structures that correspond to a given measurement timescale structure. We provide a constraint satisfaction procedure whose computational performance is several orders of magnitude better than previous approaches. We then consider finite-sample data as input, and propose the first constraint optimization approach for recovering the system timescale causal structure. This algorithm optimally recovers from possible conflicts due to statistical errors. More generally, these advances allow for a robust and non-parametric estimation of system timescale causal structures from subsampled time series data.

Linearity Properties of Bayes Nets with Binary Variables

It is "well known" that in linear models: (1) testable constraints on the marginal distribution of observed variables distinguish certain cases in which an unobserved cause jointly influences several observed variables; (2) the technique of "instrumental variables" sometimes permits an estimation of the influence of one variable on another even when the association between the variables may be confounded by unobserved common causes; (3) the association (or conditional probability distribution of one variable given another) of two variables connected by a path or trek can be computed directly from the parameter values associated with each edge in the path or trek; (4) the association of two variables produced by multiple treks can be computed from the parameters associated with each trek; and (5) the independence of two variables conditional on a third implies the corresponding independence of the sums of the variables over all units conditional on the sums over all units of each of the original conditioning variables.These properties are exploited in search procedures. It is also known that properties (2)-(5) do not hold for all Bayes nets with binary variables. We show that (1) holds for all Bayes nets with binary variables and (5) holds for all singly trek-connected Bayes nets of that kind. We further show that all five properties hold for Bayes nets with any DAG and binary variables parameterized with noisy-or and noisy-and gates.