What is it about?
To understand what it means of a technical system to be 'accountable', we suggest to analyze the causal model of the system. Since one can only be accountable for actions they caused, accountability relations can be identified in such causal models.
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Why is it important?
Automated decision making systems, cyber physical systems and other socio-techincal systems have ever more power and influence on our society. As such we want to hold the creator and operators for such systems accountable for the system's action. To do so, we first need to understand what this exactly means. And here our work offers a means to express, discuss and evaluate the accountability of a system.
Perspectives
So far many works, especially in computer science, try to make specific systems 'accountable'. However, they only rarely define what they exactly mean and often ignore the vast body of knowledge on accountability in other fields. It is my hope that our research can help to bridge that gap and helps to improve the design of systems.
Severin Kacianka
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Designing Accountable Systems, March 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3442188.3445905.
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