Toward Stakeholder-Driven Explainability for Ethically Constrained Physical-AI Decisions
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Explainability is an important non-functional requirement for AI-enabled systems. Despite growing interest in human-centered approaches, prevailing frameworks remain largely system-centered and grounded in technical properties rather than stakeholder needs. In particular, we lack empirically derived, stakeholder-driven explainability requirements for ethically constrained autonomous decision-making. This paper addresses that gap through an empirical-first requirements engineering approach. We conducted five scenario-based focus groups with 20 participants. Participants represented four stakeholder roles, including those with experience in autonomous systems, expertise in ethics, operational experience, and community members without domain-specific expertise. Participants discussed ten ethical dilemmas involving autonomous emergency response drones. We applied Socio-Technical Grounded Theory to 282 codable segments and derived a seven-category taxonomy of explainability requirements. Four categories cover established XAI concerns such as epistemic transparency and decision rationales, while three focus on previously under-explored areas of real-time operational communication, institutional accountability, and human-machine decision-authority boundaries. From these categories, we produce an initial set of requirement patterns that link stakeholder roles and scenario ethics. In a post-study validation survey, participants confirmed that the taxonomy categories captured their expressed concerns, and taxonomy-informed explanations were preferred over generic ones across multiple evaluation dimensions.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Thu 20 AugDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | AI Ethics, Governance & ExplainabilityResearch Papers / Journal-First at A-1600 Chair(s): Martin Glinz University of Zurich | ||
11:00 30mTalk | AI Transparency: Governance Compliance or Stakeholder Requirements? Research Papers Pre-print | ||
11:30 30mTalk | Toward Stakeholder-Driven Explainability for Ethically Constrained Physical-AI Decisions Research Papers Demetrius Hernandez The University of Notre Dame, Katsumi Ibaraki University of Notre Dame, Rich Morales Brown University, Jane Cleland-Huang University of Notre Dame | ||
12:00 30mTalk | Decoupling in AI Ethics: Learning how to Walk the Talk Journal-First Ravit Dotan TechBetter, Tomer Gershoni University of Haifa, Irit Hadar University of Haifa, Gil Luria University of Haifa | ||
Main Auditorium