For our first Digital Trust and Security Guest Seminar of 2022 we were delighted to host Dr Andreas Theodorou, Forskare (Research Fellow) joining us online from the Department of Computing Sciences, Umeå University. The event was chaired by Dr Lucas Cordeiro, our cluster lead for Trusted Digital Systems in the Centre for Digital Trust and Society and Reader in Prog Analysis & Cyber Security, who opened the event and welcomed the attendees and our guest speaker.
Dr Theodorou provided a fascinating talk on “Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency for Human Control”. He first explained that the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our societies comes with the increased public demand for human control. Maintaining effective control over such systems is an ongoing socio-technical challenge that has sparked global discussions and recommendations in the form of soft policy documents, i.e. guidelines and standards, and the creation of control frameworks for human oversight. Such guidelines rely heavily on high-level statements that provide no clear criteria for system assessment. Furthermore, the proposed control framework put the onus of responsibility exclusively on the human end-user; away from the developers and deployers of those systems. In this online talk, Dr Theodorou discussed the concept of meaningful human control, which extends beyond mere oversight by including design and governance layers. Through a video demonstration, Dr Theodrou proposed how the combination of context-specific AI assessment and variable autonomy—dynamically adjustable levels of autonomy—can ensure such control over an artefact and satisfy all three core values commonly advocated in ethical guidelines: accountability, responsibility, and transparency.
Finally, Digital Trust and Security Guest Seminars always finish with a lively discussion session with members of the Centre for Digital Trust & Society and guest participants from across the UK and further afield.
A big thank you to Dr Andreas Theodorou for his expert input. Check out our other Digital Trust and Security events here.
DTS Guest Seminars are provided by the Centre of Digital Trust and Security, part of the University of Manchester’s Digital Futures network.
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