CFP: AI and Public Sector Application (Deadline July 20th)

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Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector

The democratization of AI has begun. AI is no longer reserved for a few highly specialized enterprises. As easy-to-configure AI methods proliferate, we see that simple, localized, but nonetheless very useful AI applications are beginning to pervade society. Government and the public sector are not immune from this trend.

However, AI in government and the public sector faces unique challenges and opportunities. These systems will be held to a higher standard since they are supposed to operate for the “public good.” They face increased scrutiny for transparency, fairness, explainability, and operation without unintended consequences. Governments provide critical services and are expected to be the provider of last resort, sometimes backstopping the commercial sector. How can the development, deployment, and use of these systems be managed to ensure they meet these requirements by design and in practice? How can their use be proactively monitored to ensure their operations meet these objectives in practice?

Topics

This symposium will focus on these unique elements of government and public sector AI systems. We invite contributions addressing topics including the following:

  • Adoption: Best practices for ensuring adoption and acceptance of AI in Government – navigating the environmental challenges to plan, build, and deploy AI in government.
  • Applications: Public sector problems where AI can play an important role without deep new experimentation, for example, fighting terrorism, serving vulnerable populations, understanding regulations, combating child trafficking…
  • Transparency: Ensuring transparency and comprehensibility in the governmental use of AI, to avoid anti-democratic preferential access and treatment to select members of society.
  • Security: Ensuring that AI systems are designed and built to be robust and resilient in the face of systemic, cyber, external manipulation, and other risks.
  • Fairness: Developing AI methods to support auditing in order to detect bias, and then benchmark any efforts to mitigate unwanted bias.
  • Innovation: Using AI to encourage public service innovation. What areas are less immediately approachable by AI, but still pose an urgent need, and hence offer significant  financial and social reward for experimentation by public administrators?
  • Ecosystem: Translating from .com to .gov – looking at the reality that .gov adoption of AI is not in the same ecosystem as a commercial company. How can one establish and foster public-private partnerships around AI methods and services to the benefit of both?
  • Standards: Developing a systematic approach for the use of AI in government (for example, policies, methodologies, guides) or elements in support of such use (for example, taxonomies, ontologies).
Submissions

The symposium will include presentations of accepted papers in both oral and panel discussion formats, together with invited speakers and software demonstrations. Potential symposium participants are invited to submit either a full-length technical paper or a short position paper for discussion. Full-length papers must be no longer than eight (8) pages, including references and figures. Short submissions can be up to four (4) pages in length and describe speculative work, work in progress, system demonstrations, or panel discussions.

Please submit via the AAAI EasyChair site choosing the Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector track. Please submit by July 20.

Organizing Committee

Frank Stein, Chair (IBM), Mihai Boicu (George Mason University), Lashon Booker (Mitre), Chris Codella (IBM), Michael Garris (NIST), Eduard Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University), Chuck Howell (Mitre), Anupam Joshi (University of Maryland Baltimore County), Ned McCulloch (IBM), Alun Preece (Cardiff University), Jim Spohrer (IBM), John Tyler

 

URL: https://aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fss18symposia.php#fs03