Technologies for Trustworthy Machine Learning: A Survey in a Socio-Technical Context

Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments and other organisations around the world to propose AI policy frameworks to address fairness, accountability, transparency and related topics. To achieve the objectives of these frameworks, the data and software engineers who build machine-learning systems require knowledge about a variety of relevant supporting tools and techniques. In this paper we provide an overview of technologies that support building trustworthy machine learning systems, i.e., systems whose properties justify that people place trust in them. We argue that four categories of system properties are instrumental in achieving the policy objectives, namely fairness, explainability, auditability and safety & security (FEAS). We discuss how these properties need to be considered across all stages of the machine learning life cycle, from data collection through run-time model inference. As a consequence, we survey in this paper the main technologies with respect to all four of the FEAS properties, for data-centric as well as model-centric stages of the machine learning system life cycle. We conclude with an identification of open research problems, with a particular focus on the connection between trustworthy machine learning technologies and their implications for individuals and society.

The relationship between trust in AI and trustworthy machine learning technologies

To build AI-based systems that users and the public can justifiably trust one needs to understand how machine learning technologies impact trust put in these services. To guide technology developments, this paper provides a systematic approach to relate social science concepts of trust with the technologies used in AI-based services and products. We conceive trust as discussed in the ABI (Ability, Benevolence, Integrity) framework and use a recently proposed mapping of ABI on qualities of technologies. We consider four categories of machine learning technologies, namely these for Fairness, Explainability, Auditability and Safety (FEAS) and discuss if and how these possess the required qualities. Trust can be impacted throughout the life cycle of AI-based systems, and we introduce the concept of Chain of Trust to discuss technological needs for trust in different stages of the life cycle. FEAS has obvious relations with known frameworks and therefore we relate FEAS to a variety of international Principled AI policy and technology frameworks that have emerged in recent years.