[Summary]    [Vision]    [Call for papers]    [Organization]    [Submission]    [Programme]    [Registration]

Workshop on Ontology and Semantics of Explanations and Trustworthy AI

OSETAI is a new workshop on explanation documentation, a topic that is experiencing major growth.

Explainability and the documentation of explanations are now increasingly considered key technologies to making modelling useful in practice. In fact, this has now become a key area of innovation, since substantial investments were made in AI models that are not explainable and are generally not trustworthy. Making such models more ready for use in critical environments would require providing explanations or grounds for trust; this will be possible in some cases, not in all, but it can be observed that funds and investments are increasingly directed toward that aim.

At the same time, the traditional, inherently interpretable modelling and simulation techniques, such as physics-based modelling, can now reassert themselves: A major argument in their favour has always been that they are explainable and trustworthy, especially for extrapolation outside the range of data that were used for model parameterization.

A related epistemic issue concerns the explanations themselves, ranging from accounts and informational descriptions to causal explanations and, ultimately, judgments that support responsible decision making and trust. This includes ontological distinctions between validating individual components, claims, or behaviors and validating models or systems as coherent wholes, together with the semantics of how evidence, explanations, and trust propagate across these levels.

Metadata standardization and the alignment and harmonization of metadata standards for this type of annotation will be among the workshop's themes. On the less technical, more foundational side, we will discuss what constitutes an explanation or interpretation, what is needed to make something trustworthy, and how these concepts can be characterized, evaluated, given explicit ontological commitments, and connected to foundational and middle-level ontological frameworks.

DigiPass CSA is funded from the EC's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under GA no. 101137725.