This AI Can Explain Itself.

Really!
Published 14 January 2021

Harpal Parmar

The success of Deep Learning AI systems has leveraged neural networks to

solve difficult problems such as self-driving cars, spotting fraudulent banking
transactions, language translation, and more. These AI systems are
remarkably good at analyzing huge amounts of data, spotting patterns and
learning from them. They use a system of data layers, including hidden ones,
to compute results. Hence it get’s a little tricky when such AI needs to explain
the logic and reasoning behind a decision.

Consider an industry regulator that wishes to inspect the logic underlying the
denial of a financial loan. Similarly, an investigation into the malfunction of an
autonomous vehicle will throw up questions around causes. These questions
point to the need for Explainable AI (XAI).

What powers robust XAI ? An answer lies in the field of Symbolic AI. When a
system converts incoming information to symbols and then performs logic
and reasoning, we obtain explainable decisions. This is how human
intelligence generally operates.

Consider a system that examines human-generated operational text logs in

conjunction with time-series data from equipment – it then applies reasoning,
using in-built business process knowledge. Such a system converts complex
textual information into structured form via its Natural Language
Understanding (NLU) engine in conjunction with a business domain
knowledge base. The system can now understand root causes of why an
equipment failed, leveraging both text based and quantitative data. It also
allows an analyst to interact with available information using a natural
language interface. Importantly, it can explain any output fully and
transparently.

XAI is likely to become very relevant as high-stakes AI applications such as

complex decisions in finance, engineering, and medicine will require high
accuracy and complete explainability. Knowledge-based AI – which is a form
of symbolic AI – excels in XAI. It is rapidly scalable due to a flexible
knowledge base. AUI Systems provides a ready Knowledge-based AI. We
term it “Fully Explainable” or FXAI – where each output can be explained and
audited.