Transparency in Algorithmic Decision Making.

The past decade has seen increasing deployment of powerful automated decision-making systems in settings ranging from smile detection on mobile phone cameras to control of safety-critical systems. While evidently powerful in solving complex tasks, these systems are typically completely opaque, i.e. they provide hardly any mechanisms to explore and understand their behaviour and the reasons underlying their decisions. This opaqueness raises numerous legal, ethical and practical concerns, which have led to initiatives and recommendations on how to address these problems, calling for greater scrutiny in the deployment of automated decision-making systems. Clearly, joint efforts are required across technical, legal, sociological and ethical domains to address these increasingly pressing issues.