Accountability Framework for Healthcare AI Systems: Towards Joint Accountability in Decision Making

AI is transforming the healthcare domain and is increasingly helping practitioners to make health-related decisions. Therefore, accountability becomes a crucial concern for critical AI-driven decisions. Although regulatory bodies, such as the EU commission, provide guidelines, they are highlevel and focus on the ''what'' that should be done and less on the ''how'', creating a knowledge gap for actors. Through an extensive analysis, we found that the term accountability is perceived and dealt with in many different ways, depending on the actor's expertise and domain of work. With increasing concerns about AI accountability issues and the ambiguity around this term, this paper bridges the gap between the ''what'' and ''how'' of AI accountability, specifically for AI systems in healthcare. We do this by analysing the concept of accountability, formulating an accountability framework, and providing a three-tier structure for handling various accountability mechanisms. Our accountability framework positions the regulations of healthcare AI systems and the mechanisms adopted by the actors under a consistent accountability regime. Moreover, the three-tier structure guides the actors of the healthcare AI system to categorise the mechanisms based on their conduct. Through our framework, we advocate that decision-making in healthcare AI holds shared dependencies, where accountability should be dealt with jointly and should foster collaborations. We highlight the role of explainability in instigating communication and information sharing between the actors to further facilitate the collaborative process.

Analyzing and Mitigating Bias for Vulnerable Classes: Towards Balanced Representation in Dataset

The accuracy and fairness of perception systems in autonomous driving are crucial, particularly for vulnerable road users. Mainstream research has looked into improving the performance metrics for classification accuracy. However, the hidden traits of bias inheritance in the AI models, class imbalances and disparities in the datasets are often overlooked. In this context, our study examines the class imbalances for vulnerable road users by focusing on class distribution analysis, performance evaluation, and bias impact assessment. We identify the concern of imbalances in class representation, leading to potential biases in detection accuracy. Utilizing popular CNN models and Vision Transformers (ViTs) with the nuScenes dataset, our performance evaluation reveals detection disparities for underrepresented classes. We propose a methodology for model optimization and bias mitigation, which includes data augmentation, resampling, and metric-specific learning. Using the proposed mitigation approaches, we see improvement in IoU(%) and NDS(%) metrics from 71.3 to 75.6 and 80.6 to 83.7 respectively, for the CNN model. Similarly, for ViT, we observe improvement in IoU and NDS metrics from 74.9 to 79.2 and 83.8 to 87.1 respectively. This research contributes to developing more reliable models and datasets, enhancing inclusiveness for minority classes.

A Survey on Approximate Edge AI for Energy Efficient Autonomous Driving Services

Autonomous driving services rely heavily on sensors such as cameras, LiDAR, radar, and communication modules. A common practice of processing the sensed data is using a high-performance computing unit placed inside the vehicle, which deploys AI models and algorithms to act as the brain or administrator of the vehicle. The vehicular data generated from average hours of driving can be up to 20 Terabytes depending on the data rate and specification of the sensors. Given the scale and fast growth of services for autonomous driving, it is essential to improve the overall energy and environmental efficiency, especially in the trend towards vehicular electrification (e.g., battery-powered). Although the areas have seen significant advancements in sensor technologies, wireless communications, computing and AI/ML algorithms, the challenge still exists in how to apply and integrate those technology innovations to achieve energy efficiency. This survey reviews and compares the connected vehicular applications, vehicular communications, approximation and Edge AI techniques. The focus is on energy efficiency by covering newly proposed approximation and enabling frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first to review the latest approximate Edge AI frameworks and publicly available datasets in energy-efficient autonomous driving. The insights and vision from this survey can be beneficial for the collaborative driving service development on low-power and memory-constrained systems and also for the energy optimization of autonomous vehicles.