We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 17 at 17:30 (CET), Francesca Poggiolesi (University Paris 1) will give the talk Explaining with reasons: from Aristotle to Explainable AI as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2024 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.

This hybrid talk will take place in the Multiuso room, Theology Building, USI West Campus and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining it online, please write to events.isfi@usi.ch

For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/26653

Here is the abstract of the talk:

Explanations, and in particular explanations which provide the reasons why their conclusion is true, are a central object in a range of fields. On the other hand, there is a long and illustrious philosophical tradition, which starts from Aristotle, and passes through scholars as Leibniz, Bolzano and Frege, that give pride to this type of explanations, and is rich with brilliant and profound intuitions. Recently, Poggiolesi (2024) has formalized ideas coming from this tradition using the logical tools proper to proof theory. On the one hand, recent work has focused on Boolean circuits that compile some common machine learning classifiers and have the same input-output behavior. In this framework, Darwiche and Hirth (2023) have proposed a theory for unveiling the reasons behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers, and they have studied their theoretical implications. In this talk we will show the deep links behind these two trends: in particular, we will show that the proof-theoretic tools introduced by Poggiolesi can be used to compute the complete reasons behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers and we will illustrate them using examples. This is a joint work with B. Hill (GREGHEC, Paris).