'Research Insider': «Making intelligent systems understandable to humans»

Among the many relevant challenges that the Big Data paradigm has brought to the attention of data scientists and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, one of them has been very recently stated by the USA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): “even though current AI systems offer many benefits in many applications, their effectiveness is limited by a lack of explanation ability when interacting with humans”. In this context, it is worthy to note that interpretability issues are deeply rooted in the core of the Soft Computing sub-field of AI since the first ideas published by Zadeh in 1965, towards the most recent work dealing with human-centric computing, computing with words and perceptions, etc.

This talk will be focused on how to develop Interpretable Fuzzy Systems (IFS), i.e., systems easily understood, trusted on or accounted for human beings; systems which are highly appreciated in applications where the interaction with humans is the main concern, in fields like medicine, agriculture, marketing, robotics, etc. Then, we discuss the role that IFS can play with the aim of addressing the last DARPA challenge on explainable AI. Finally, preliminary results in an empirical study aimed at finding out how end users may understand easier the decision made by a fuzzy system when they were provided with a textual interpretation of the related fuzzy inferences will be presented.