| Title | Designing Accountable Systems |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Severin Kacianka, Alexander Pretschner |
| Conference Name | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency |
| Date Published | 03/2021 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Conference Location | Virtual Event, Canada |
| ISBN Number | 9781450383097 |
| Keywords | accountability, PIRE, Societal Design, socio-technical systems, Structural Causal Models |
| Abstract | Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the early history of Liberalism and is suggested as a tool to limit the use of power. This long history has also given us many, often slightly differing, definitions of accountability. The problem that software developers now face is to understand what accountability means for their systems and how to reflect it in a system's design. To enable the rigorous study of accountability in a system, we need models that are suitable for capturing such a varied concept. In this paper, we present a method to express and compare different definitions of accountability using Structural Causal Models. We show how these models can be used to evaluate a system's design and present a small use case based on an autonomous car. |
| URL | https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445905 |
| DOI | 10.1145/3442188.3445905 |
| Citation Key | 10.1145/3442188.3445905 |
Designing Accountable Systems