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Part 3: MAKE Privacy ; International audience ; Exponential trends in data generation are presenting today's organizations, economies and governments with challenges never encountered before, especially in the field of privacy and data security. One crucial trade-off regulators are facing regards the simultaneous need for publishing personal information for the sake of statistical analysis and Machine Learning in order to increase quality levels in areas like medical services, while at the same time protecting the identity of individuals. A key European measure will be the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, giving customers the 'right to be forgotten', i.e. having their data deleted on request. As this could lead to a competitive disadvantage for European companies, it is important to understand which effects deletion of significant data points has on the performance of ML techniques. In a previous paper we introduced a series of experiments applying different algorithms to a binary classification problem under anonymization as well as perturbation. In this paper we extend those experiments by multi-class classification and introduce outlier-removal as an additional scenario. While the results of our previous work were mostly in-line with our expectations, our current experiments revealed unexpected behavior over a range of different scenarios. A surprising conclusion of those experiments is the fact that classification on an anonymized dataset with outliers removed in beforehand can almost compete with classification on the original, un-anonymized dataset. This could soon lead to competitive Machine Learning pipelines on anonymized datasets for real-world usage in the marketplace.

International audience ; In this short editorial we present some thoughts on present and future trends in Artificial Intelligence (AI) generally, and Machine Learning (ML) specifically. Due to the huge ongoing success in machine learning, particularly in statistical learning from big data, there is rising interest of academia, industry and the public in this field. Industry is investing heavily in AI, and spin-offs and start-ups are emerging on an unprecedented rate. The European Union is allocating a lot of additional funding into AI research grants, and various institutions are calling for a joint European AI research institute. Even universities are taking AI/ML into their curricula and strategic plans. Finally, even the people on the street talk about it, and if grandma knows what her grandson is doing in his new start-up, then the time is ripe: We are reaching a new AI spring. However, as fantastic current approaches seem to be, there are still huge problems to be solved: the best performing models lack transparency, hence are considered to be black boxes. The general and worldwide trends in privacy, data protection, safety and security make such black box solutions difficult to use in practice. Specifically in Europe, where the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on May, 28, 2018 which affects everybody (right of explanation). Consequently, a previous niche field for many years, explainable AI, explodes in importance. For the future, we envision a fruitful marriage between classic logical approaches (ontologies) with statistical approaches which may lead to context-adaptive systems (stochastic ontologies) that might work similar as the human brain.

The development of theory, frameworks and tools for Explainable AI (XAI) is a very active area of research these days, and articulating any kind of coherence on a vision and challenges is itself a challenge. At least two sometimes complementary and colliding threads have emerged. The first focuses on the development of pragmatic tools for increasing the transparency of automatically learned prediction models, as for instance by deep or reinforcement learning. The second is aimed at anticipating the negative impact of opaque models with the desire to regulate or control impactful consequences of incorrect predictions, especially in sensitive areas like medicine and law. The formulation of methods to augment the construction of predictive models with domain knowledge can provide support for producing human understandable explanations for predictions. This runs in parallel with AI regulatory concerns, like the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, which sets standards for the production of explanations from automated or semi-automated decision making. Despite the fact that all this research activity is the growing acknowledgement that the topic of explainability is essential, it is important to recall that it is also among the oldest fields of computer science. In fact, early AI was re-traceable, interpretable, thus understandable by and explainable to humans. The goal of this research is to articulate the big picture ideas and their role in advancing the development of XAI systems, to acknowledge their historical roots, and to emphasise the biggest challenges to moving forward.