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(a)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).