An historical perspective on XAI

Preparatory document for an AFIA tutorial July 2020

Abstract

The international research movement on “Explicable Artificial Intelligence” has developed considerably in recent years, and most conferences in the field now offer sessions on the subject, while groups are forming around the acronym XAI. The urgency of this research has become apparent with the extraordinary impact on society of “artificial intelligences”, and even more so when these “AIs” are the result of learning from massive data, and even more so, if possible, when the learning process exploits techniques known as “deep learning”.