More Aims at Explainable AI

More interesting moves in providing explanation to AI.  Here from Ga Tech.   As in the previous recent  post, this asks the question:   What does explainable mean?   And to whom in what context?  Simplicity is good, if everyone agrees to its truth and value.

A Breakthrough in Explainable AI   By Joe Dysart in CACM
A new artificial intelligence (AI) agent offers easy-to-understand English explanations of the AI's analysis and decisions.

Such tools of explanation are considered critical by those working in AI who fear users may be reluctant to embrace AI applications that make recommendations whose rationales are shrouded in mystery.

"As AI pervades all aspects of our lives, there is a distinct need for human-centered AI design that makes black-boxed AI systems explainable to everyday users," says Upol Ehsan, a doctoral student in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and lead author of the study.  "Our work takes a formative step toward understanding the role of language-based explanations and how humans perceive them."

Adds Devi Parikh, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, "Just like human teams are more effective when team members are transparent and can understand the rationale behind each others decisions or opinions, human-AI teams will be more effective if AI systems explain themselves and are somewhat interpretable to a human."

Eshan and his research team set out to solve the explainable AI problem by developing an AI agent that could offer easy-to-understand explanations to humans in certain settings.

For their research, the team—including researchers from Georgia Tech, Cornell University, and the University of Kentucky—decided to create an AI agent that would analyze and explain moves in the video game "Frogger." The game is an ideal choice for developing an AI agent, given its simplicity: the entire goal of the game is to move an animated frog across a screen, enabling it to dodge oncoming vehicles and other animated hazards.

The researchers trained their AI agent by first asking gamers to play Frogger as they explained the rationale behind each action they took, move by move."  ... '