The ChaLearn AutoML Challenge (The authors are in alphabetical order of last name, except the first author who did most of the writing and the second author who produced most of the numerical analyses and plots.) (NIPS 2015-ICML 2016) consisted of six rounds of a machine learning competition of progressive difficulty, subject to limited computational resources. It was followed by

Explainability and interpretability are two critical aspects of decision support systems. Within computer vision, they are critical in certain tasks related to human behavior analysis such as in health care applications. Despite their importance, it is only recently that researchers are starting to explore these aspects. This paper provides an introduction to explainability and interpretability in the context of computer vision with an emphasis on looking at people tasks. Specifically, we review and study those mechanisms in the context of first impressions analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. Additionally, we describe a challenge we organized on explainability in first impressions analysis from video. We analyze in detail the newly introduced data set, evaluation protocol, proposed solutions and summarize the results of the challenge. Finally, derived from our study, we outline research opportunities that we foresee will be decisive in the near future for the development of the explainable computer vision field.Keywords Explainable computer vision · First impressions · Personality analysis · Multimodal information · Algorithmic accountability 1 IntroductionLooking at People (LaP) -the field of research focused on the visual analysis of human behavior -has been a very active research field within computer vision in the last decade [28,29,62]. Initially, LaP focused on tasks associated with basic human behaviors that were obviously visual (e.g., basic gesture recognition [71,70] or face recognition in restricted scenarios [10,83]). Research progress in LaP has now led to models that can solve those initial tasks relatively easily [66,82]. Instead, attention on human behavior analysis has now turned to problems that are not visually evident to model / recognize [84,48,72]. For instance, consider the task of assessing personality traits from visual information [72]. Although there are methods that can estimate apparent personality traits with (relatively) acceptable performance, model recommendations by themselves are useless if the end user is not confident on the model's reasoning, as the primary use for such estimation is to understand bias in human assessors.Explainability and interpretability are thus critical features of decision support systems in some LaP tasks [26]. The former focuses on mechanisms that can tell what is the rationale behind the decision or recommendation made by

ChaLearn is organizing the Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) contest for IJCNN 2015, which challenges participants to solve classification and regression problems without any human intervention. Participants' code is automatically run on the contest servers to train and test learning machines. However, there is no obligation to submit code; half of the prizes can be won by submitting prediction results only. Datasets of progressively increasing difficulty are introduced throughout the six rounds of the challenge. (Participants can enter the competition in any round.) The rounds alternate phases in which learners are tested on datasets participants have not seen, and phases in which participants have limited time to tweak their algorithms on those datasets to improve performance. This challenge will push the state of the art in fully automatic machine learning on a wide range of real-world problems. The platform will remain available beyond the termination of the challenge

International audienceThis paper reviews and discusses research advances on “explainable machine learning” in computer vision. We focus on a particular area of the “Looking at People” (LAP) thematic domain: first impressions and personality analysis. Our aim is to make the computational intelligence and computer vision communities aware of the importance of developing explanatory mechanisms for computer-assisted decision making applications, such as automating recruitment. Judgments based on personality traits are being made routinely by human resource departments to evaluate the candidates' capacity of social insertion and their potential of career growth. However, inferring personality traits and, in general, the process by which we humans form a first impression of people, is highly subjective and may be biased. Previous studies have demonstrated that learning machines can learn to mimic human decisions. In this paper, we go one step further and formulate the problem of explaining the decisions of the models as a means of identifying what visual aspects are important, understanding how they relate to decisions suggested, and possibly gaining insight into undesirable negative biases. We design a new challenge on explainability of learning machines for first impressions analysis. We describe the setting, scenario, evaluation metrics and preliminary outcomes of the competition. To the best of our knowledge this is the first effort in terms of challenges for explainability in computer vision. In addition our challenge design comprises several other quantitative and qualitative elements of novelty, including a “coopetition” setting, which combines competition and collaboration

Evaluation in empirical computer science is essential to show progress and assess technologies developed. Several research domains such as information retrieval have long relied on systematic evaluation to measure progress: here, the Cranfield paradigm of creating shared test collections, defining search tasks, and collecting ground truth for these tasks has persisted up until now. In recent years, however, several new challenges have emerged that do not fit this paradigm very well: extremely large data sets, confidential data sets as found in the medical domain, and rapidly changing data sets as often encountered in industry. Also, crowdsourcing has changed the way that industry approaches problem-solving with companies now organizing challenges and handing out monetary awards to incentivize people to work on their challenges, particularly in the field of machine learning. This paper is based on discussions at a workshop on Evaluation-as-a-Service (EaaS). EaaS is the paradigm of not providing data sets to participants and have them work on the data locally, but keeping the data central and allowing access via Application Programming Interfaces (API), Virtual Machines (VM) or other possibilities to ship executables. The objectives of this paper are to summarize and compare the current approaches and consolidate the experiences of these approaches to outline the next steps of EaaS, particularly towards sustainable research infrastructures. The paper summarizes several existing approaches to EaaS and analyzes their usage scenarios and also the advantages and disadvantages. The many factors influencing EaaS are overviewed, and the environment in terms of motivations for the various stakeholders, from funding agencies to challenge organizers, researchers and participants, to industry interested in supplying real-world problems for which they require solutions.

Abstract. The Semantic Web is intended as a web of machine readable data where every data source can be the data provider for different kinds of applications. However, due to a lack of support it is still cumbersome to work with RDF data in modern, object-oriented programming languages, in particular if the data source is only available through a SPARQL endpoint without further documentation or published schema information. In this setting, it is desirable to have an integrated tool-chain that helps to understand the data source during development and supports the developer in the creation of persistent data objects. To tackle these issues, we introduce LITEQ, a paradigm for integrating RDF data sources into programming languages and strongly typing the data. Additionally, we report on two use cases and show that compared to existing approaches LITEQ performs competitively according to the Halstead metric.

This paper presents a new unsupervised approach to generating ultra-concise summaries of opinions. We formulate the problem of generating such a micropinion summary as an optimization problem, where we seek a set of concise and non-redundant phrases that are readable and represent key opinions in text. We measure representativeness based on a modified mutual information function and model readability with an n-gram language model. We propose some heuristic algorithms to efficiently solve this optimization problem. Evaluation results show that our unsupervised approach outperforms other state of the art summarization methods and the generated summaries are informative and readable.

Web search logs are of growing importance to researchers as they help understanding search behavior and search engine performance. However, search logs typically contain sensitive information about users and therefore considerable caution must be exercised when considering releasing the logs to the research community. Current approaches to releasing search logs focus on either protecting the privacy of users or enhancing the utility of data to researchers. In this work, we address the privacy-utility tradeoff by providing safe access to search logs, instead of releasing them. We propose a policy based safe interactive framework built on semantic policies and differential privacy to allow researchers access to search logs, while maintaining the privacy of the users. Semantic policies are used to infer the higher levels of information that can be mined from a dataset based on the fields accessed by a researcher. The accessed fields are then used to build research profile(s) that guide the amount of privacy to be enforced using differential privacy. We show the additional utility that can be obtained in our framework by two demonstrative experiments that involve access to user level information. Our results indicate that valid research can be conducted in our framework without forgoing the privacy of individuals.