ONLINE PARALLEL EVENT - May 2022 - Explainable RL & Constraint-Based Programming

Info:
Hello everyone and welcome to Brum.AI!
This month we are running a parallel event, one in-person at the Huel offices in The Custard Factory in Birmingham and one on Zoom (this event). Please sign up for this event if you would like to join the Zoom call. This event will be streamed live. There will still be plenty of opportunities to chat and network with other participants on Zoom, and ask questions to the speakers.

Location
Online

Agenda
18:40 Join the event
18:45 - 19:20 Talk 1 + Q&A
19:20 - 19:25 Speaker Intermission
19:25 - 20:00 Talk 2 + Q&A

Event overview

Talk one - Juan Marcelo:
The adoption of AI and Machine Learning (ML) has become ubiquitous in modern software. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a particular sub-field of ML with great success in applications such as self-driving cars, industrial automation, and finance systems, among many others. Despite its broad applicability, the nature of RL is still considered a “black-box” where system decisions can become opaque to stakeholders. The insufficiency of validation techniques for the reasoning done by the system when using RL is a deterrent to broader adoption. Explaining the decision-making processes becomes increasingly important to enhance collaboration, and to increment confidence in these types of systems. This is ratified by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, which enshrines the right to explanation.
Juan will present ongoing research on applying the SE approaches of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Event-Driven Monitoring (EDM) for explainability in RL.

Talk two - Daniel Allford:
Constraint-based programming takes a heuristic approach to solving a variety of problems, and whilst constraint-based programs are typically going to be sub-optimal, often enough, a “satisfactory” solution is all that’s needed. Within this domain, hundreds of hours can be devoted to the creation of a bespoke and highly tuned algorithm, one that is able to exploit the details of a problem to improve a yield or increase efficiency. But it is this specificity which will make the algorithm inevitably hard to evolve, and much more worryingly, hard to understand. Fortunately, we can expediate the tuning of these algorithms, deferring the modelling of these problems to highly optimised solvers that can do 80% of the hard work for 2% of the cost.
But...

1. Why should people care about constraints?
2. How do these solvers work?
3. Are they the “be all, and end all”?

The answers to these questions will be followed by a discussion on the implementation of MILPS (constraint programs) to model trained neural networks, a method which enables guarantees about the optimality of an algorithm.

Speaker Bios
Juan Marcelo’s research career started in his home country Ecuador in 2015 where he applied Internet of Things (IoT) and SE techniques to build ambient assisted living solutions for the elderly. In 2018, he came to the UK to start his PhD at Aston University researching SE techniques for enabling explainability in autonomous self-adaptive systems (SAS). Currently, he works as a senior research associate at the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol.

• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eFeGkgQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-marcelo-parra-ullauri-7b27a313a/

Daniel Allford, of circuitmind.io, is a lead software engineer with years of experience spanning a variety of roles that consistently utilise cutting-edge technologies. From data science, data migration and automation, Daniel’s primary interest is now within constraint-based programming, a paradigm dedicated to solving combinatorial problems.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-allford-901b233a/.
[https://medium.com/@d-allford](https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F%40d-allford&trk=flagship-messaging-web&messageThreadUrn=urn%3Ali%3AmessagingThread%3A2-MDkxMmE0ZWMtMDk1Zi00NTBjLTk5OWQtZmE1ZWY0NTdhNzZjXzAxMg%3D%3D)

**About Brum.ai**
Brum.ai is for everyone, wherever you may be on your AI journey. Each month we invite speakers who bring different perspectives and initiate conversation. After the talks, we usually split into small breakout rooms to discuss and get to know each other.

We want our events to be welcoming and inclusive and we use the Berlin Code of Conduct (https://berlincodeofconduct.org/) as our guide.
Looking forward to seeing you :)