Reproducibility as a Mechanism for Teaching Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we explain the setup for a technical, graduate-level course on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence (FACT-AI) at the University of Amsterdam, which teaches FACT-AI concepts through the lens of reproducibility. The focal point of the course is a group project based on reproducing existing FACT-AI algorithms from top AI conferences and writing a corresponding report. In the first iteration of the course, we created an open source repository with the code implementations from the group projects. In the second iteration, we encouraged students to submit their group projects to the Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenge, resulting in 9 reports from our course being accepted for publication in the ReScience journal. We reflect on our experience teaching the course over two years, where one year coincided with a global pandemic, and propose guidelines for teaching FACT-AI through reproducibility in graduate-level AI study programs. We hope this can be a useful resource for instructors who want to set up similar courses in the future.

Automated summary

This paper explains the setup of a graduate-level course on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence (FACT-AI) at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on teaching FACT-AI concepts through reproducibility. The course involves a group project where students reproduce existing FACT-AI algorithms and write corresponding reports. The authors reflect on their experience teaching the course over two years, including during a global pandemic, and propose guidelines for teaching FACT-AI through reproducibility in graduate-level AI study programs.