The EXplainable & Responsible AI in Law (XAILA) Workshop

The main XAILA webpage is http://xaila.geist.re

XAILA is an interdisciplinary workshop on the intersection of AI and Law, focusing on the important issues of EXplainable and Responsible AI.

In 2021 we are planning next editions of XAILA.

See more information on the past editions of XAILA.

The 4th International Workshop on eXplainable and Responsible AI and Law (XAILA2021@ICAIL) at the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2021) held in Sao Paulo, Brazil (entirely online), Date: 21 June 2021

The idea of the XAILA series of JURIX workshops (1st edition XAILA 2018 in Groningen, 2nd edition XAILA 2019 in Madrid, 3rd edition XAILA 2020 in Brno (online)) is to provide an interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of ideas with respect to explainable AI, algorithmic transparency, comprehensiveness, interpretability and related topics. This year’s edition is particularly focused on the emerging idea of responsible AI (RAI) and multiple connections between the notions of explainability and responsibility but we also aim to continue the discussion in the scope of all domains related to the workshop’s topic.

Michał Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Martin Atzmueller, University in Osnabrück, Germany
Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Bart Verheij, University in Groningen, the Netherlands

xaila2021icail-cfp1.pdf

June 21 (Monday) Entirely online (the login information provided via email)

All hours are in GMT

Workshop starts

• 15.30-15.45 – Opening
• 15.45-16.45 – Keynote Lecture - Wojciech Wiewiórowski (European Data Protection Supervisor), Data protection aspects of Explainability of AI: Between transparency and fairness

Paper session 1

• 16.45-17.15 – Trevor Bench-Capon, Using Issues to Explain Legal Decisions
• 17.15-17.45 – Salvatore Sapienza, Explanations in Risk Analysis: Responsibility, Trust and the Precautionary Principle
• 17.45-18.15 - Alžběta Krausová, Miloslav Konopík, Ondřej Pražák, Jakub Sido, Veronika Žolnerčíková, Václav Moravec and Jaromír Volek, Socially Responsible Virtual Assistant for Privacy Protection: Implementing Trustworthy AI

• 18.15-18.30 - break
• 18.30-19.20 – Keynote Lecture – Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool), The Landscape and Challenges for Explainability in AI and Law

Paper session 2

• 19.20 - 19.40 - Davide Carneiro, Patrícia Veloso, Miguel Guimarães, Joana Baptista and Miguel Sousa, A Conversational Interface for interacting with Machine Learning models
• 19.40-20.10 - Cor Steging, Bart Verheij and Silja Renooij, Discovering the Rationale of Decisions: Experiments on Aligning Learning and Reasoning
• 20.10-20.40 - roundtable discussion

In the last several years we have observed a growing interest in advanced AI systems achieving impressive task performance. However, there has also been an increased awareness of their complexity and challenging consequences of their possibly limited understandability to humans. In response, a number of research directions have been initiated. These include humanized or human-centered AI, as well as ethically aligned, ethically designed, or just ethical AI. For many of these ideas, the principal concept seems to be the explanatory capability of the AI system (XAI), e.g. via interpretable and explainable machine learning, inclusion of human background knowledge and adequate declarative knowledge, that could provide foundations not only for transparency and understandability, but also for a possible value alignment and human centricity, as the explanation is to be provided to humans.

Recently, the term responsible AI (RAI) has been coined as a step beyond XAI. Discussion of RAI has been again strongly influenced by the “ethical” perspective. However, as practitioners in our fields we are convinced that the advancements of AI are way too fast, and the ethical perspective much too vague to offer conclusive and constructive results. We are convinced that the concepts of responsibility, and accountability should be considered primarily from the legal perspective, also because the operation of AI-based systems poses actual challenges to rights and freedoms of individuals. In the field of law, these concepts should obtain some well-defined interpretation, and reasoning procedures based on them should be clarified. The introduction of AI systems into the public, as well as the legal domain brings many challenges that have to be addressed. The catalogue of these problems include, but is not limited to: (1) the type of liability adequate for the operation of AI (be it civil, administrative of criminal liability); (2) the (re)interpretation of classical legal concepts concerning the ascription of liability, such as causal link, fault or foreseeability and (3) the distribution of liability among the involved actors (AI developers, vendors, operators, customers etc.). As the notions relevant for the discussion of legal liability evolved on the basis of observation and evaluation of human behavior, they are not easily transferable to the new and disputable domain of liability related to the operation of artificial intelligent systems. The goal of the workshop is to cover and integrate these problems and questions, bridging XAI and RAI by integrating methodological AI, as well as the respective ethical and legal perspectives, also specifically with support of established concepts and methods regarding responsibility, and accountability.

Our objective is to bring people from AI interested in XAI and RAI topics  and create an ample space for discussion with people from the field of legal scholarship and/or legal practice, and most importantly the vibrant AI & Law community. As many members of the AI and Law community join both perspectives, the JURIX conference is the perfect venue for the workshop. Together we would like to address some questions like:

• the notions of transparency, interpretability and explainability in XAI
• non-functional design choices for explainable and transparent AI systems
• legal consequences of black-box AI systems
• legal criteria and requirements for explainable, transparent, and responsible AI systems
• criteria of legal responsibility discussed in the context of intelligent systems operation and the role of explainability in liability ascription
• possible applications of XAI systems in the area of legal policy deliberation, legal practice, teaching and research
• legal implications of the use of AI systems in different spheres of societal life
• the notion of right to explanation
• relation of XAI and RAI to argumentation technologies
• approaches and architectures for XAI and RAI in AI systems
• XAI, RAI and declarative domain knowledge
• risk-based approach to analysis of AI systems and the influence of XAI on risk assessment
• incorporation of ethical values into AI systems, its legal interpretation and consequences
• XAI, privacy and data protection (conceptual and theoretical issues)
• XAI, certification and compliance

Submission:                18.05.2021
Notification:                    01.06.2021
Camera-ready:               10.06.2021
Workshop:                      21.06.2021

We accept regular/long papers up to 10-22pp. We also welcome short and position papers from 6-11pp. Please use the Springer LNCS format. A dedicated Easychair installation is provided at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=xaila2021icail

Martin Atzmüller, Osnabrück University, Germany
Michał Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Floris Bex, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Szymon Bobek, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Jörg Cassens, University of Hildesheim, Germany
David Camacho, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Enrico Francesconi, IGSG-CNR, Italy
Paulo Novais, University of Minho Braga, Portugal
Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Tiago Oliveira, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Martijn von Otterlo, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Adrian Paschke, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Juan Pavón, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Monica Palmirani, Università di Bologna, Italy
Radim Polčák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Jaromír Šavelka, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Michal Valco, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia
Bart Verheij, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Tomasz Żurek, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin, Poland

We are delighted that two excellent keynote speakers accepted our invitation to present their lectures at XAILA2011@ICAIL. They are:

Prof. Katie Atkinson

Title: The Landscape and Challenges for Explainability in AI and Law

Bio: Katie Atkinson is Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK.  Katie's specialist area of research is on computational models of argument, with a recent focus on explainable AI for modelling legal reasoning. She has published over one hundred and fifty articles in peer-reviewed conferences and journals and has also applied her work in a variety of collaborative projects with law firms. Katie was Program Chair of the fifteenth edition of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law held in San Diego, USA in 2015 and she served as President of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL) in 2016 and 2017. In 2020 Katie was appointed to serve as a member of the Lawtech UK Panel, a government-backed initiative to help transform the UK legal sector through technology.  Katie is also currently serving on the Computer Science and Informatics sub-panel in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021.  

Prof. Wojciech Wiewiórowski, European Data Protection Supervisor

Bio: Adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Gdańsk. He was among others adviser in the field of e-government and information society for the Minister of Interior and Administration, the Director of the Informatisation Department at the Ministry of Interior and Administration. He also represented Poland in committee on Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (the ISA Committee) assisting the European Commission. The Inspector General for the Protection of Personal Data (Polish Data Protection Commissioner) 2010-2014 and the Vice Chair of the Working Party Art. 29 in 2014. In December 2014, he was appointed Assistant European Data Protection Supervisor. After the death of the Supervisor - Giovanni Buttarelli in August 2019 - he replaced Mr. Buttarelli as acting EDPS. His areas of scientific activity include first of all Polish and European IT law, processing and security of information, legal information retrieval systems, informatisation of public administration, and application of new IT tools (semantic web, legal ontologies, cloud, blockchain) in legal information processing. 

The workshop will take place on 09.12.2020 online using MSTeams. More details will follow.

9:15-9:30 Workshop Opening by the XAILA2020 Chairs (Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Michał Araszkiewicz, Martin Atzmueller, Bart Verheij)

Session 1

9:30-10:00 Barbara Gallina, Görkem Pacaci, David Johnson, Steve McKeever, Andreas Hamfelt, Stefania Costantini, Pierangelo Dell'Acqua and Gloria-Cerasela Crisan: Towards Explainable, Compliant and Adaptive Human-Automation Interaction

10:00-10:30 Youssef Ennali and Tom van Engers: Data-driven AI development: an integrated and iterative bias mitigation approach

10:30-11:00 coffee break

Session 2

11:00-12:00 INVITED TALK Philipp Hacker - AI and Discrimination: Legal Challenges and Technical Strategies

12:00-12:30 Heng Zheng, Davide Grossi and Bart Verheij: Precedent Comparison in the Precedent Model Formalism: Theory and Application to Legal Cases

12:30-13:00 Bernardo Alkmim, Edward Hermann Haeusler and Daniel Schwabe: Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs in an Intuitionistic Description Logic

13:00-14:00 lunch break

Session 3

14:00-15:00 INVITED TALK Reinoud Baker - Legal information systems in production

15:00-15:30 Annemarie Borg and Floris Bex: Explaining Arguments at the Dutch National Police

15:30-16:00 coffee break

Session 4 and Roundtable discussion

16:00-16:30 Łukasz Górski, Shashishekar Ramakrishna and Jędrzej M. Nowosielski: Towards Grad-CAM Based Explainability in a Legal Text Processing Pipeline

16:30-17:00 Giovanni Sileno, Alexander Boer, Geoff Gordon and Bernhard Reader: Like Circles in the Water: Responsibility as a System-Level Function

17:00-17:30 Karl Branting: Explanation in Hybrid, Two-Stage Models of Legal Prediction

17:30-18:15 Roundtable discussion and closing

Professor Dr. Philipp Hacker, LL.M. (Yale), holds the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He serves jointly at the Faculty of Law and at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). Before joining Viadrina, he was an AXA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law at Humboldt University of Berlin. Previous research stays include a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute and an A.SK Fellowship at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. His research focuses on law and technology as well as (behavioral) law and economics. In 2020, he received the Science Award of the German Foundation for Law and Computer Science. His most recent books include Regulating Blockchain. Techno-Social and Legal Challenges (Oxford University Press, 2019, co-edited with Ioannis Lianos, Georgios Dimitropoulos and Stefan Eich); Theories of Choice. The Social Science and the Law of Decision Making (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, co-edited with Stefan Grundmann); and Datenprivatrecht [Private Data Law] (Mohr Siebeck, 2020).

Title of the talk AI and Discrimination: Legal Challenges and Technical Strategies

Abstract The talk will focus on the interaction between AI models and liability in the domain of non-discrimination. As is well-known, the output of AI models may exhibit bias toward legally protected groups. In the past, various fairness definitions have been developed to mitigate such discrimination. Against this background, the talk will first present a new model which allows AI developers to flexibly interpolate between different fairness definitions depending on the context of the model application. In the second step, however, the talk will inquire to what extent AI developers may risk liability under affirmative action doctrines if they seek to implement algorithmic fairness measures in their models.

Reinoud Baker

Title Legal information systems in production

Abstract LexIQ is a Dutch legal tech startup using data science for legal information services. We have the vision that legal tech can serve citizens, governments and businesses, for instance by improved access to justice, efficient use of resources and enhanced compliance. This talk will address what we have learned in the past 4 years. What can be achieved with modern software and algorithms? How can we make innovative technologies available for legal professionals and even the wider public? Which challenges are we encountering?

xaila2020cfp1.pdf

In the last several years we have observed a growing interest in advanced AI systems achieving impressive task performance. However, there has also been an increased awareness of their complexity and challenging consequences of their possibly limited understandability to humans. In response, a number of research directions have been initiated. These include humanized or human-centered AI, as well as ethically aligned, ethically designed, or just ethical AI. In many of these ideas, the principal concept seems to be the explanatory capability of the AI system (XAI), e.g. via interpretable and explainable machine learning, inclusion of human background knowledge and adequate declarative knowledge, that could provide foundations not only for transparency and understandability, but also for a possible value alignment and human centricity, as the explanation is to be provided to humans.

Recently, the term responsible AI (RAI) has been coined as a step beyond XAI. Discussion of RAI has been again strongly influenced by the “ethical” perspective. However, as practitioners in our fields we are convinced, that the advancements of AI are way too fast, and the ethical perspective much too vague to offer conclusive and constructive results. We are convinced, that the concepts of responsibility, and accountability should be considered primarily from the legal perspective, also because the operation of AI-based systems poses actual challenges to rights and freedoms of individuals. In the field of law, these concepts should obtain some well-defined interpretation, and reasoning procedures based on them should be clarified. The introduction of AI systems into the public, as well as the legal domain brings many challenges that have to be addressed. The catalogue of these problems include, but is not limited to: (1) the type of liability adequate for the operation of AI (be it civil, administrative of criminal liability); (2) the (re)interpretation of classical legal concepts concerning the ascription of liability, such as causal link, fault or foreseeability and (3) the distribution of liability among the involved actors (AI developers, vendors, operators, customers etc.). As the notions relevant for the discussion of legal liability evolved on the basis of observation and evaluation of human behavior, they are not easily transferable to the new and disputable domain of liability related to the operation of artificial intelligent systems. The goal of the workshop is to cover and integrate these problems and questions, bridging XAI and RAI by integrating methodological AI, as well as the respective ethical and legal perspectives, also specifically with support of established concepts and methods regarding responsibility, and accountability.

Our objective is to bring people from AI interested in XAI and RAI topics and create an ample space for discussion with people from the field of legal scholarship and/or legal practice, and most importantly the vibrant AI&Law community. As many members of the AI and Law community join both perspectives, the JURIX conference is the perfect venue for the workshop. Together we would like to address some questions like:

• the notions of transparency, interpretability and explainability in XAI
• non-functional design choices for explainable and transparent AI systems
• legal consequences of black-box AI systems
• legal criteria and requirements for explainable, transparent, and responsible AI systems
• criteria of legal responsibility discussed in the context of intelligent systems operation and the role of explainability in liability ascription
• possible applications of XAI systems in the area of legal policy deliberation, legal practice, teaching and research
• legal implications of the use of AI systems in different spheres of societal life
• the notion of right to explanation
• relation of XAI and RAI to argumentation technologies
• approaches and architectures for XAI and RAI in AI systems
• XAI, RAI and declarative domain knowledge
• risk-based approach to analysis of AI systems and the influence of XAI on risk assessment
• incorporation of ethical values into AI systems, its legal interpretation and consequences
• XAI, privacy and data protection (conceptual and theoretical issues)
• XAI, certification and compliance

Workshop format: paper presentations + panel discussion, invited talk/s.

Intended audience are practitioners and theorists from both law and AI.

List of members of the program committee (to be confirmed):
Martin Atzmueller, Osnabrueck University, Germany
Michal Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Szymon Bobek, AGH University, Poland
Jörg Cassens, University of Hildesheim, Germany
David Camacho, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Teresa Moreira, University of Minho Braga, Portugal
Paulo Novais, University of Minho Braga, Portugal
Grzegorz J. Nalepa, AGH University, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Tiago Oliveira, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Martijn von Otterlo, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Adrian Paschke, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Monica Palmirani, Università di Bologna, Italy
Radim Polčák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Marie Postma, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Jaromír Šavelka, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Michal Valco, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia
Tomasz Żurek, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin, Poland

Submission: 09.11.2020 04.11.2020 26.10.2020
Notification: 23.11.2020
Camera-ready: 30.11.2020
Workshop: 09.12.2020

We accept regular/long papers up to 12pp. We also welcome short and position papers of 6pp. Please use the Springer LNCS format.

A dedicated Easychair installation is provided at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=xaila2020

Workshop proceedings will be made available by CEUR-WS. A post workshop journal publication is considered.

The first edition, XAILA2018 was Organized by: Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Martin Atzmueller, Michał Araszkiewicz, Paulo Novais
at the 31st international conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems December 12–14, 2018 in Groningen, The Netherlands See the dedicated page for XAILA2018

XAILA 2018 proceedings can be found at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2381

We also proposed XAILA to be held on the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL), June 17-21, 2019, Montréal (Qc.), Canada. While the workshop was met with a large interest, and attracted many registered participants, surprisingly too few papers were actually submitted. See the dedicated page for XAILA2019@ICAIL

The second edition of XAILA, XAILA2019 was Organized by: Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Martin Atzmueller, Michał Araszkiewicz, Paulo Novais
at the JURIX 2019 32nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems on the December 11, 2019, Madrid, Spain in ETSI Minas y Energía School (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) See the dedicated page for XAILA2019

XAILA 2019 proceedings can be found at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2681