Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has become a popular topic and we may ask which kinds of interconnections may exist between preferences and explanations. Explanations have been considered in artificial intelligence since a long time as an intelligent system should not only be able to solve problems, but also capable to explain its solutions. Explanations are particularly important if the solution … Read more
Scientific exchange has always been essential for scientific progress. The reason for this is simple: scientific theories need to be challenged, criticized, and put to the test. Scientific progress requires a debate between scientists who are pursuing different approaches and who are dialoguing with each other by developing arguments and counterarguments.
Scientific inquiry is concerned with the discovery of universally valid theories. These can be mathematical theories and universality can be established by proofs. Or these can be theories about the world and the inquiry needs to go through a process that seeks to show experimentally that the theory is wrong. The theory is adopted if it is able to explain the observed phenomena and all efforts to falsify it have failed.
Decision policies are everywhere in our society of the early 21st century. They are used for a large variety of tasks ranging from loan approval, shopping recommendation, simple query-answering as used in chatbots up to the configuration of cars and PCs. They may be based on explicit rules, be extrapolated from data, or be formulated as constrained optimization problems.
The world wide web touches a profound elementary human need, the need of receiving, emitting, and displaying information. This came unexpected. Technologists often struggle to realize their dreams and do not pose questions about the possible societal impact of their technology that is obtained once the technology is working. As such, even the inventors of the world wide web do not know why it has such a …
