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.