Tools and Methods for Companies to Build Transparent and Fair Machine Learning Systems

Abstract: AI has quickly grown from being a vast concept to an emerging technology that many companies are looking to integrate into their businesses, generally considered an ongoing “revolution” transforming science and society altogether. Researchers and organizations agree that AI and the recent rapid developments in machine learning carry huge potential benefits. At the same time, there is an increasing worry that ethical challenges are not being addressed in the design and implementation of AI systems. As a result, AI has sparked a debate about what principles and values should guide its development and use. However, there is a lack of consensus about what values and principles should guide the development, as well as what practical tools should be used to translate such principles into practice. Although researchers, organizations and authorities have proposed tools and strategies for working with ethical AI within organizations, there is a lack of a holistic perspective, tying together the tools and strategies proposed in ethical, technical and organizational discourses. The thesis aims to contribute with knowledge to bridge this gap by addressing the following purpose: to explore and present the different tools and methods companies and organizations should have in order to build machine learning applications in a fair and transparent manner. The study is of qualitative nature and data collection was conducted through a literature review and interviews with subject matter experts. In our findings, we present a number of tools and methods to increase fairness and transparency. Our findings also show that companies should work with a combination of tools and methods, both outside and inside the development process, as well as in different stages of the machine learning development process. Tools used outside the development process, such as ethical guidelines, appointed roles, workshops and trainings, have positive effects on alignment, engagement and knowledge while providing valuable opportunities for improvement. Furthermore, the findings suggest that it is crucial to translate high-level values into low-level requirements that are measurable and can be evaluated against. We propose a number of pre-model, in-model and post-model techniques that companies can and should implement in each other to increase fairness and transparency in their machine learning systems.