>> CARLOS DUARTE: People are still joining, but it's about time we start. We are delighted that you are able to join us in this Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility Research Symposium. We are looking forward to a couple of days of stimulating presentations and discussions. My name is Carlos Duarte and, on behalf of the whole organizing team, I would like to offer you our warmest welcome. Let me just take a moment to say a big thank you to the wonderful people that made this happen, my colleague here at the University of Lisbon, Letícia Seixas Pereira, and a group of people from the W3C Architecture Working Group, and those from the W3C Accessibility Initiative.
Before we get going, just a couple of important reminders. By taking part in this symposium you agree to follow the W3C code of ethics and professional conduct and ensure to promote a safe environment for everyone in this meeting. Also, this session is being video recorded and transcribed. The transcription will be posted on the symposium website later. If you object to being transcribed, we ask you to refrain from commenting.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the European Commission that funds the WAI-CooP project through the Horizon 2020 program.
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As I mentioned before, this symposium is one of the results of the WAI-CooP project. That project started in January of 2021 and will run until the end of this year. This is the second symposium which means that we will still have another symposium later this year. The main goal of the WAI CooP project is to support the implementation of international standards for digital accessibility. It aims to achieve this goal from various perspectives. It will provide different overviews of accessibility related resources, including tools or training resources. It will develop actions like this one to promote collaboration between research and development players, and it is creating opportunities for the stakeholders in this domain to exchange their best practices through, for example, a series of open meetings.
As I just mentioned, this is the second of three symposiums that will be organized by the WAI-CooP project. This symposium aims to identify current challenges and opportunities raised by the increasing use of AI regarding digital accessibility and to explore our ongoing research that can leverage and hinder digital accessibility. I'll now finish by introducing you to today's agenda. We will start with a keynote by Jutta Treviranus. This will be followed by our first panel, the panel will focus on the use of computer vision techniques in the scope of accessibility of media resources. Before the second panel, we'll have a 10 minute coffee break. The second, and the last panel of today, it will also address the accessibility of media resources but now from the perspective of natural language processing.
Now let's move to the opening keynote, for which we're delighted to welcome Jutta Treviranus. Jutta Treviranus is the director of the Inclusive Design Research Center and the professor in the faculty of design at the OCAD University in Toronto. The floor is yours.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Thank you, Carlos. It is a great pleasure to be able to talk to you about this important topic. I am going to just start my slides. I'm hoping that what you see is just the primary slide, correct?
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Correct.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Wonderful. Okay. Thank you, everyone. I will voice my slides and the information and the images. I have titled my talk First, Do No Harm. I'm usually really optimistic of a person, I'm hoping to provide an optimistic message.
To realize the benefits of AI, I believe we need to further recognize and take into account the harms. I'm going to limit my discussion to the harms that are specific to People with Disabilities. There is a great deal of work detailing the ethical concerns of currently deployed AI from lack of representation to human bigotry, finding its way into algorithms to manipulative practices, unfair value extraction and exploitation and disinformation. I'll focus on accessibility and disability, including the recognition that disability is at the margins of all other justice deserving groups, therefore, most vulnerable to the general and emerging harms, but also the potential opportunities of AI. Carlos shared a number of questions and they're all great questions. We agreed this is better covered through a conversation than a presentation. At the end of my talk, I'm going to invite Shari and we'll talk more about this tomorrow after the book talk.
Our society is plagued by more and more difficulties. As the world becomes more and more complex and entangled, the choices increase in ambiguity, the risks associated with each decision becomes more consequential, the factors to consider in each decision more numerous, convoluted, confusing. Especially times of crisis, like we have been experiencing these last few years, in highly competitive situations where there is scarcity, AI decision tools become more and more attractive and useful. As an illustrative example, it is no wonder that over 90% of organizations use some form of AI hiring tool according to the U.S. equal employment opportunity commission. As work becomes less formulated and finding the right fit becomes more difficult, they are a highly seductive tool. As an employer, when choosing who to hire from a huge pool of applicants what, better way to sift through, find the gems and eliminate the potential fail choices than to use AI system, with an AI tool making the decisions we remove the risks of conflicts of interest and nepotism. What better way to determine who will be a successful candidate than to use all of the evidence we have gathered from our current successful employees, especially when the jobs we're trying to fill are not formulating and there is not a valid test to devise for candidates to determine their suitability, AI can use predictive analytics to find the optimal candidates.
In this way, we're applying solid, rigorous science in what would be an unscientific decision, otherwise we're not relying on fallible human intuition. Tools are adding information beyond the application to rule out falsehoods in the applications, after all, you never know, there are so many ways to fake a work history, a cover letter or to cheat in academia. The AI hiring tools can verify through gleaned social media data and information available on the web or through networked employment data. After all, employees have agreed to share this as part of the conditions of employment, and other employers have agreed as a conditions of using the tool. If that is not enough, AI administered and processed assessments can be integrated. The tools are going beyond the practical and qualitatively determinable capacity of candidates to finding the best fit culturally to make sure that the chosen candidates don't cause friction but integrate comfortably. The tools will even analyze data from interviews to have a socio emotional fit of candidates. If that's not satisfactory, the employer can tweak the system to add factors like the favored university or an ideal persona and pick an ideal employee as a model and the systems are better and more sophisticated in finding a match. The same system can then guide promotion and termination ensuring consistency of employment policies.
So what's wrong with this? Science, math, statistical reasoning, efficiency, accuracy, consistency, better and more accurate screening for the best fit of the scientifically determined optimal employee, accurate replication and scaling of a winning formula, it is a very seductive opportunity. What could be wrong? For the employing organization we have a mono culture recreating and showing the successful patterns of the past .with more data and more powerful analysis the intended target becomes more and more precise. The employer finds more and more perfect fits. What's wrong with that? For the organization, what happens when the context changes? Then the unexpected happens, a monoculture doesn't offer much adaptation, flexibility, alternative choices.
As a visual description, I have an image showing what happened to cloned potatoes in a plight that was survived by a diverse crop. Of course, we have diversity, equity and inclusion measures to compensate for discriminatory hiring and increase the number of employees from protected, underrepresented groups. Even there, there will be an even greater rift between the mono culture and the candidates hired through diversity and equity programs. What happens to the candidate with the disability who would otherwise be a great fit for doing the job when judged by these hiring systems. When AI is analyzing sorting and filtering data about a large group of people, what does disability look like? Where is disability in a complex entangled adopt active multivarying dataset. Self identification is often disallowed and many people don't self identify, even if we had a way to identify the definition and boundaries of disability are highly contested. Disability statisticians are acutely aware of some of the challenges. In any normal distribution, someone with a disability is an outlier, the only common data characteristic of disability is different from the average, the norm, People with Disabilities are also more diverse from each other than people without disabilities. Data points in the middle are close together, meaning that they are more alike, data points at the periphery, they're further apart, meaning that they're more different from each other. Data regarding people living with disabilities are spread the furthest in what I call the starburst of human needs. As a result of this pattern, any statistically determined prediction is highly accurate for people that cluster in the middle, inaccurate moving from the middle and wrong as you get to the edge of a data plot.
Here I'm not talking about AI's ability to recognize and translate things that are average or typical, like typical speech or text or from one typical language to another or to label typical objects in the environment or to find the path that most people are taking from one place to another. Even there, in these miraculous tools we're using, if we have a disability, if the speech is not average, if the environment you're in is not typical, AI also fails. Disability is the Achilles' heel of AI applying statistical reasoning in disability. You have the combination of diversity, variability, the unexpected, complexity and entanglement and the exception to every rule or determination. AI systems are used to find applicants that match predetermined optima with large datasets of successful employees and hires. The system is optimizing the successful patterns of the past, all data is from the past. The analytical power tool is honing in on and polishing the factors that worked before and we know how much hiring there is of people with disabilities in the past. The tool is built to be biased against different disabilities, different ways of doing the job, different digital traces, different work and education history, different social media topics and entangled profile of many differences.
As AI gets better or more accurate in its identification of the optima, AI gets more discriminatory and better at eliminating applicants that don't match the optima in some way. The assumptions the AI power tools are built on, scaling and replicating past success will bring about future success. Optimizing data characteristics associated with past successes increases future successes. The data characteristics that determine success need not be specified or known to the operators of the AI or the people who are subject to the decisions, and the AI cannot articulate at the moment the highly defused, possibly an adaptive reasons behind the choices. Current AI systems cannot really explain themselves or the choices despite the emergence of explainable AI. How many of you have experienced tools like Microsoft and other similar tools that purport to help you be more efficient and productive by analyzing the work habits. The surveillance systems provide more and more granular data about employment providing intelligence about the details of the average optimal employee. The results of the AI design is that the optima will not be a person with a disability. There are not enough successfully employed Persons with Disabilities but it is more than data gaps, even if we have full representation of data from Persons with Disabilities there will not be enough consistent data regarding success to reach probability thresholds. Even if all data gaps are filled, each pattern will still be an outlier or minority, and will lack problematic power in the algorithm. The same pattern is happening in all life altering difficult decisions. AI is being applied and offered to competitive academic admissions departments, so you won't get admitted to beleaguered health providers in the form of medical calculators and emergency triage tools resulting in more death and illness if you're different from your classification, to policing, to parole board, to immigration and refugee adjudications, to tax auditor, meaning more tax payer with disabilities are flagged, to loan, mortgage officers, meaning people with unusual asset patterns won't get credit, to security departments, meaning outliers become collateral damage.
At a community level we have evidence based investment by governments, AI guiding political platforms, public health decision, urban planning, emergency preparedness and security programs. None will decide with the marginalized outlier, the outliers will be marked as security risks. These are monumental life changing decisions, but even the smaller seemingly inconsequential decisions can harm by a million cuts. What gets covered by the new, what products make it to the market, the recommended root route provided by GPS, the priority given to supply chain process, what design features make it to the market.
Statistical reasoning that's inherently biased against difference from the average is not only used to apply the metrics, but to determine the optimum metrics. This harm predates AI. Statistical reasoning as the means of making decisions does harm. It does harm to anyone not like the statistical average or the statistically determined optima. Assuming that what we know about the majority applies to the minority does harm. Equating truth and valid evidence with singular statistically determined findings or majority truth does harm. AI amplifies, accelerates and automates this harm. It is used to exonerate us of responsibility for this harm.
We have even heard a great deal about the concern for privacy. Well, people with disability, they're most vulnerable to data abuse and misuse. Deidentification does not work if you're highly unique, you will be reidentified. Differential privacy will remove the helpful data specifics that you need to make the AI work for you and your unique needs. Most People with Disabilities are actually forced to barter their privacy for essential services. We need to go beyond privacy, assume there will be breaches and create systems to prevent data abuse and misuse. We need to ensure transparency regarding how data is used, by whom and what purpose. It is wonderful that the E.U. is organizing this talk, because the E.U. is doing some wonderful measures in this regard.
Wait, we're talking about a great number of harms. Haven't we developed some approaches, some solutions to this? Don't we have auditing tools that detect and eliminate bias and discrimination of AI? Don't we have some systems that certify whether an AI is ethical or not? Can't we test tools for unwanted bias?
Unfortunately, AI auditing tools are misleading in that they don't detect bias against outliers and small minorities or anyone who doesn't fit the bounded groupings. Most AI ethics auditing systems use cluster analysis comparing the performance regarding a bounded justice deserving group with the performance for the general population. There is no bounded cluster for disability. Disability means a defused, highly diverse set of differences. Those AI ethic certification systems and the industry that is growing around them raise the expectation of ethical conduct, that the problem has been fixed, making it even more difficult for the individual to address harm. Many falls prey to cobra effects or the unintended consequences of over simplistic solutions to complex problems or linear thinking, falling into the the rut of mono causality, where the causes are complex and entangled.
There is some helpful progress in regulatory guidance, one example, it is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission which has developed the The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Use of Software, Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence to Assess Job Applicants and Employees, it is a very long title. Much of the guidance focuses on fair assessments or tests and accommodation, not on the filtering out of applicants before they're invited to take an assessment or by employers who don't use assessments. The data related suggestion is to remove the disability related data that is the basis of disability discrimination. What we found, it is that the data cannot be isolated. For example, in an interrupted work history, it will have other data effects and markers, making it hard to match the optimal pattern, even when that is removed.
For the ethical harms, that are common to a whole group of marginalized and individuals, there are numerous AI ethic efforts emerging globally. We have tried to capture the disability relevant ones in the We Count project. This includes standard bodies creating a number of standards that act as guidance, government initiatives that are looking at impact of decisions using automated decision tools, academic research units that are looking at the effects process and others. We have found that disability is often left out of the considerations or the ethic approaches. As the questions that were submitted indicated, we're at an inflection point and this current inflection point we're at, reminds me of the book the Axemaker's Gift, by Burke & Ornstein. They wanted us to be aware of the Axemaker's Gifts. Each time there was an offering of a new way to cut and control the world to make us rich or safe or invincible, more knowledgeable, we accepted the gift and used it and we changed the world, we changed our minds, for each gift, redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived and the truths for which we died.
But to regain my optimism, even AI's potential harm may be a double edged sword. The most significant gift of AI is that it manifests the harms that have been dismissed as unscientific concerns. It gives us an opportunity to step back and reconsider what we want to automate or what we want to accelerate. It makes us consider what we mean by best, by optimal, by truth, democracy, planning, efficiency, fairness, progress and the common good.
Some of the things we have done within my unit to provoke this rethinking include our inverted word cloud, a tiny little mechanism that conventional word cloud increases the size and centrality of the most popular or statistically frequent words. The less popular, outlying words decrease in size and disappear. We have simply inverted that behavior. The novel, the unique words go to the center and grow in size. We have been trying to prove, indicate with models, like the lawnmower of justice where we take the top off of the Gaussian or the bell curve, as it may be called, to remove the privilege of being the same as the majority. The model needs to pay greater attention to the breadth of data. We're exploring bottom up community led data ecosystems where the members govern and share in the value of the data. This fills the gap left by things, like impact investing, for example. When social entrepreneurship efforts that are supposedly addressing these problems can't scale a single impactful formula sufficiently to garner support, it also works well to grow knowledge of things like rare illnesses that won't garner a market for the treatments and therefore are not invested in.
We're creating tools to reduce harm by signaling when a model will be wrong, unreliable, because the evidence based guidance is wrong for the person being decided about. Here we're using a tool, the dataset nutrition label that gives information about what data is used to train the model.
Back to the Axemaker's Gift and the opportunity to reconsider where we're going, from a complexity perspective, we're collectively stuck on a local optima, unable to unlearn our fundamental summits and approaches to find the global optima. I believe there is a global optima. At the moment, as a society, we believe, or we act like that, to succeed we need to do what we have been doing more effectively, efficiently, accurately, consistently. We're hill climb, optimizing the patterns of the past, eroding the slope for anyone following us. We need to stop doing the same things more efficiently and potentially reverse course.
I have been considering the many local optima. We keep hill climbing, not just statistical reasoning finding a single winning answer, not just winner takes all, zero sum gain capitalism and growth at all cost but majority rules, all or nothing decisions. And even in our community, the accessibility community, the notion of a single checklist of full accessibility for a group of hugely diverse people, many of whom are not represented when coming up with the list.
The people closest to the bottom are more diverse, closest to the path we need to follow to find the global optima, less invested in current conventions. We need to diversify and learn to use our complementary skills and learn from people who are currently marginalized, even in this community focused on accessibility. If anyone knows, we know that it is at the margins, outer edge of our human starburst that we find the greatest innovation and the weakest and the weak signals of crisis to come. This is where you feel the extremes of both the opportunities and the risks. One of the emerging uncertainties that holds both greater opportunities and risks, it is generative AI.
What are the implications, if you have a disability, what will it do for accessibility? I'm sure you have heard about tools like chatGPT, Stable Infusion, various versions of DALL-E, Midjourney and other tools, even today there are announcements of new tools. They don't rely purely on statistical reasoning, they can transfer learning from context to context, they use new processes called transformers that can pivot to new applications. They can also create convincing, toxic lies. People with Disabilities tend to be most vulnerable to the misuse and abuse of toxic tools.
I'm going to invite Shari to help me address the emerging possibilities.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Hello, everybody. I'm from Google, Shari Trewin, a middle age white woman with a lot of smile lines on my face.
So there's a lot to think about there! I wonder if we might start off where you ended there talking a little bit about generative AI models and language models, and they're trained on a large amount of data that may not reflect the moral values that we would like our models to incorporate. One question I think that would be interesting for to us talk about is can we teach these large language models or generative AI to apply these moral values -- even though the very large datasets may not represent that.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: That's a great question. Thinking of how that might be done, one of the dilemmas is that we may need to find a way to quantify abstract qualitative values. In that process, will that reduce these values. Deep winning lacks judgment, the human sort of value, the human judgment that isn't quantitative, perhaps one way to start is by recognizing human diversity and the diversity of context. There is a lot of talk about individualizing applications, without making the cost exorbitant to the people that need them. The irony, of course, in that is that the people that need that type of individualization the most are most likely to be the people that can't afford it. It is not yet known, can we do that? Of course, there has been surprising advances and all sorts of different areas with respect to AI and generative AI, but I think this is the issue of values and shared values, and the articulation, and making “mechanizable” because, of course, we're talking about a machine and recognition, values that we have difficulty even fully expressing is quite a challenge.What do you think, Shari?
>> SHARI TREWIN: It is a good point, can we express, or can we measure whether a model meets our values, or whether we think it is free from bias or as free from bias as we can make it? Do we know how to evaluate that? I think is an important question. Some of the steps that often get missed when creating a system that uses AI, what may help with that, it would be starting off from the beginning by thinking about who are the people who may be at risk, what are the issues that might be in the data, what historical biases may that data represent or include, and then actively working with members of those communities to understand how are we going to measure fairness here? How will we going to measure bias, what's our goal, how will we test, how will we know when we have achieved our goal. I think there is some progress that could be made in the design process and thinking about the larger system that we're embedding AI in. Everything doesn't have to be built into the one AI model and we can augment models, build systems around models, taking into account their limitations and create a better overall whole system.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Thinking about what the models are currently trained on and the masses of data used to build the models, the training data is rife with discrimination against difference, right. How do we, how do they unlearn? It is sort of, it matches some of the training that I do within my program, in that students have been socialized with very similar things and often the issue is not learning, the issue is unlearning. How do you remove those unconscious habituated values that are so embedded in our learning systems. I agree, it is a huge opportunity especially with more context aware systems. Maybe what we need to pursue is, even to address things like privacy, and the need to swim against this massive amount of data that's not applicable to you, is on device, personalized, not personalized, because personalized, it is a term that's also sort of been hijacked to mean cushioning, but individualized, let's use that term, system that takes your data and creates a bottom up picture of what's needed.
>> SHARI TREWIN: There is definitely interesting avenues to explore with transfer learning and to take a model that's been trained on data and has learned some of the concepts of the task that we want, but maybe we would like it to unlearn some of the things that it has learned, can we use techniques like transfer learning to layer on top and unteach the model, and direct the model more in the direction that we want. I think the hopeful thing about that, it needs magnitudes less data to train such a model. That make it is a little more achievable, a little less daunting for the community to take on.
Do we think that current regulation systems are currently to the task of regulating current and emerging AI and preventing the kind of harms you have been talking about?
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS:No. (Laughter). No, for a simple answer, I don't think so. There is so many issues. Laws and policies are developed at a much slower pace. We're dealing with an uncertain, very, very quickly moving, quickly adapting area. When laws well, they need to be testable. In order to be testable, we have to create these static rules that can be tested, which means we have to be fairly specific as opposed to general and abstract. That tends to lead us towards one size fits one criteria, which we know are not great if we're trying to design for diversity or encourage diversity. I think one of the things we need to innovate, it is the regulatory instruments that we can use here. What's you're thinking about this?
>> SHARI TREWIN: Yeah. I think some of these regulatory instruments that we have do apply. If you're a company that is using an AI system in screening job applicants, the disability discrimination laws still apply to you, somebody could still bring a lawsuit against you, saying that your system discriminated against them, you're still liable to defend against that and to watch out for those kinds of issues. In some ways, there are important pieces that we need in place, that can be used to tackle problems introduced when AI systems are introduced. In other ways, there is a little more of a gray area when the technology is not making discriminatory decisions, but it still may make harmful mistakes or that mislead people, that people are relying on it for. You know, if anybody here has a legal background, I would love to hear their take as well on how well the current consumer protections apply, for example, if you're using any of these tools.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: I have become aware of and worried about the people for whom the law isn't adequate. The fact that we have a law, the fact that we supposedly have measures that prevent abuse or unethical practice, if you are still being treated unethically, it makes it even harder for you. I think that the measures that we do have, the regulations that we do have, have to some way of continuously being it traded upon so that we can catch the individuals that are not included. We have to recognize that our “supposed” solutions are actually not solutions. This is never fixed, that it is, it requires this ongoing vigilance. Yeah. There is much more to say about that. Yes. It would be great to hear from anyone with a legal background.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Let's talk a little bit more about generative AI, it was mentioned in the end there. It produces very multiple convincing statements when asked a question, but also, very plausible, it completely makes things up and isn't always reliable. In fact, right now, is not connected to any form of ground truth, or able to assess the accuracy of what it makes. One question that I think is interesting is, will this technology reach a stage where it can support the kinds of decisions that we are using statistical reasoning for now, eventually. Obviously, right now, it is not there yet.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: It is interesting because just recently there have been the announcements of the systems being used for medical guidance, using large language models to come up with answers to your medical questions which, of course, is quite… It will be interesting to see what happens.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Scary, I think.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Exactly, scary. And what about the medical device given to someone within the dataset that's provided, there isn't a lot of advice. Given that the system, I mean, doesn't ask any of the LLM, the chatbots, how confident they are in their answers, they'll answer that they are confident, because there isn't a sense of, what is the risk level, or the confidence level at this particular response setup, there is no self awareness of what's wrong, what is right, what is the context in front of me.
>> SHARI TREWIN: That's a great opportunity there to explore whether we can enable models a little bit to know better what they don't know. To know when the case that they're dealing with right now is not well represented in their models or may be an outlier case that they should perhaps pass on to some other form of decision making or at least convey less confidence. You know, I think generative AI today gives us a glimpse of the future, the kind of interactions that are possible, the kind of ways we might interact with technology in the future. Clearly, there is a research priority to ground it better in truth and it needs to be much more reliable, much more trustworthy, much more accurate, but then, you know, today, it can't support the applications and the idea of using it to get medical advice, it is just, that's a very scary thing. Because it is so eloquent that it is immediately trustworthy, and it gets enough things right that we begin to trust it very quickly. In some ways, the advances that have been made, it is so good that it really highlights the dangers more effectively.
I think this is interesting to think about what a human AI interaction would look like in the future. Would we need to train it to identify bias and kind of work with a larger language model to adapt responses. Would we, you know how automatic image description has sort of evolved. At first, we would throw out words, that may should be in the picture, sometimes it was right, sometimes it would be wrong. Now you see these generated alternative texts being praised in the way that conveys the uncertainty. “Could be a tree”, or something like that. I think that the large language models could do something similar to reduce the chances of misleading people. They may say things like “many people seem to think blah, blah, blah”, or get better at citing sources. I think there is a lot of ways that we can use these in direct research to overcome some of the obvious failings that are there right now, other limitations that we currently have.
Mark has shared in the chat that I can see, from the U.S. government regulatory side much of the current laws, or regulations, they are to access government service, they're about the technical accessibility of the interfaces rather than the more AI-focused questions around system exclusion or mismatch. That's coming back to our point about the regulatory instances.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: I just noticed that Mark says what a Debbie Downer my talk is. I think, by design, we decided between Shari and I, that I would provide the mournings and Shari would provide the optimism.
>> SHARI TREWIN: I have the best job there.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: I think there are quite a few questions in the question and answer panel. Maybe what we should do, there are so many things to explore with the emerging models and so many uncertainties, there are some great questions there as well.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Yeah. How about… they're jumping around on me. New questions. I know this is not in the right order, but, as people are adding questions, they're kind of jumping. (Chuckle).
So, Bruce Bailey is asking, he says fantastic keynote, please expound on personalization having been hijacked to mean cushioning. I can guess, but that term and perspective is new to me.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: I can talk about that. A way that we recognize that we're all diverse, and especially if you have a disability, you are diverse from other People with Disabilities and that our needs are there for diverse, it is to look at how do we personalize. Personalization, it has been used as a term to look at using recommender engines, using various ways in which we're offered only information and recommendations from people like us which, of course, removes any dissidence and any diverse thinking and our exposure to alternative views and perspectives. To some extent, it causes us to, it causes greater polarization because we're also offered a personalized view of the current stance that we're taking, so that it gets confirmed again and again and again. I'm not talking that type of personalization. I'm talking about the type of personalization where the interface makes it easier for us to participate and addresses our specific very diverse requirements with respect to that participation. I moved away from the term personalization simply because I don't want it to be mistaken for the type of personalization that cushions us away from diverse perspectives because certainly, we need to be exposed to those, that diversity of perspectives and we need to consider the diverse stories that people have.
>> SHARI TREWIN: I think personalization is an essential part of accessibility in general but there's, you were talking a particular kind of personalization. AI personalization, I'll talk a bit more in the keynote at the end, about an example of AI personalization of personalized models that are permitting access to digital content which I think is a, you could have, it is the lack of use of personalization.
Yeah, so Kave Noori from EDF, thank you for this important keynote, I have seen different toolkits to test and mitigate bias in AI. What is your view on them and their usefulness?
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: We have been doing, actually as a part of a number of our projects, including ODD (Optimizing Diversity with Disability) and We Count, looking at a variety of AI ethics auditing tools and also we have done sort of the secret shopper, testing of employment tools, and seeing if we can detect the particular biases that comes, unwanted biases, as made clear by us, the tools are intended to be biased. It is the unwanted bias as a proviso. What we find, it is that they're great at cluster analysis and then they supplement the cluster analysis with a number of questions that is asked by the implementer of the system. The primary technical key to the tools is determining whether there is unfair treatment of one bounded group with another. That works well if you have something like determining whether there is discrimination regarding gender, discrimination regarding declared race, language, those sorts of things, which do cluster well. It doesn't, none of the tools really detect whether there is discrimination based upon disability. Because the particular discriminating characteristics are so diffuse and different from person to person, we don't see how it is possible in a litigation perspective, or in a regulatory perspective, to prove that you have been discriminated against. It is going to very, very difficult to come up with that proof because the particular characteristics are themselves so entangled and defused. It may not be one particular characteristic associated with your disability that you would use to say, well, look at here, I'm being discriminated against because of this characteristic that relates to my disability.
>> SHARI TREWIN: I think there are a lot of the toolkits, many of them that are in the toolkits, they're group fairness metrics like you say, where, and that's an important thing to measure and to look at. When we do have the ability to identify groups and to know for sure who's in which group, which one. The boundaries of the groups, they're always not fuzzy, you know, there's deeply embedded assumption that there are only two genders, for example. In the data, and many of the tools, and they have their problems, and disability emphasize these problems, the same problems. There are also individual fair metrics in measures and some of the toolkits include some of these kinds of measures. Instead of asking, is this group as a whole treated equivalently to this other group? They ask, are similar individuals treated similarly? You could imagine with an approach like that, if I as an individual with my unique data, I could make a case that I was discriminated against by creating another person who was similar to me in the respects that are important for this job. And see what kind of result they got compared to my result, and that would be a way to measure individual fairness and build up a case.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Yeah. Yes. Unfortunately, there is not that many tools that currently do that. The certification systems that currently exist are not implementing those. There is much to work on there.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Yeah. It is more of a case by case basis for this particular job. It is not so easy to make a blanket statement about it, but I think it is not impossible to assess. Do we have time for one more? How much longer do we have? Another 3 minutes?
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Well, you have almost 10 minutes more. You can definitely take one more.
>> SHARI TREWIN: Awesome. Great. Let's see. So, Fabien Berger, I feel that AI, but before it was KPIs or else, are searched by managers to justify their decisions or run away from the responsibility of their decisions. It follows a need for them, but with a wrong, incomplete answer. Do you agree?
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Yes. I think the issue, and I was trying to make that point but possibly not well enough, that AI is doing much of what we have done before, but it is amplifying, accelerating, and automating those things. Certainly, AI can be used for confirmation bias to find the specific justification for what it is that we need to justify, whether it is something good or something bad. A lot of the harms of AI already existed because of course AI is learning from our past practices and our data. Because, I guess I have often used the analogy of a power tool, before it was this practice that was not that we did manually, so there was an opportunity to make exceptions, to reconsider, you know, is this actually what we're doing to do something different but with the power tool, it becomes this much more impactful thing, and there is less opportunity to craft the approach that we take.
>> SHARI TREWIN: I think that's why it is really important to try to design for outliers and to consider outliers. Again, I come back to this point of a system, the system as a whole, that includes AI. If we can't guarantee that the AI itself is going to give us the characteristics we want, then we have to design around that, and be mindful of that while we're designing. There is also, of course, the opportunity to try to clean up our data in general, if there are, you know, in situations where we can identify problems with the data, we should certainly tackle that or imbalances in the data, we should certainly tackle that, that's one other step and I think there are many steps to fairness and to ethical application of AI and no one step is a magic solution to all of them. But, if we stay aware of the risks, make sure that we're talking to the right people and involving them, then I think that we can, you can at least mitigate problems and know the limits of the technologies that we're using better.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: I have been looking at some of the ethical questions that have come in. One of the discussions was about the Gaussian Curve or the Gaussian center, one thing that I think, one point that I may not have made as clearly, it is that, in fact, the myth that we need to have a single answer at the very middle of the Gaussian curve which, of course, matches our notion of majority rules, or as the way to decide amongst difficult decisions, an alternative to that, it is to address the very, very diverse edges initially and to prioritize those. Because, what then happens, it gives us room to change, it helps us to address the uncertainty and makes the whole design, or decision, or options that are available much more generous and, therefore, prepares us better for the vulnerabilities that we're going to experience and the future. Of course, I'm an academic, to say that that statistical reasoning, evidence through scientific methods is at fault is a fairly dangerous thing to say, especially during a time when truth is so much under attack. But, I think what we need to do is not reduce truth to statistical reasoning but to acknowledge that there are a variety of perspectives on truth and that we need to come up with one that addresses the people that we're currently excluding in our notions of truth.
>> SHARI TREWIN: There are two minutes left I think now. Maybe we can squeeze in one more question here. Jan Beniamin Kwiek asks do you think that AI and big companies driving research on it can be problematic towards societal issues that don't necessarily give the highest revenue? If so, how can it be fixed?
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Yeah. That's a huge question. The government efforts are basing their decision making on profit and economic progress and impact measures. I think one of the things that we need to abandon, it is this idea that a solution needs to be formulated and we need to scale it by this formula type replication. We need to recognize that there is a different form of scaling, it is by diversification and that we need to contextually apply things. I mean, that's one of the lessons of indigenous cultures, that what's labeled as colonialist, it is what many governments are in fact still implementing even in things like social entrepreneurship. Yes, big companies, of course, they're driven by profit. Is that the best approach to achieve the common good? That's a huge question.
>> SHARI TREWIN: It is a huge question. It would be a great one to come back to tomorrow in the symposium. Let's come back to that one. I see we're out of time right now. Thank you very much, Jutta.
>> JUTTA TREVIRANUS: Thank you. We'll have the positive tomorrow! (Laughter).
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much, Jutta and Shari, a great keynote, a very interesting follow up, great discussion between you both. Also, there are still some open questions in the Q&A, if you feel like tackling them now offline, feel free to do so.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Let's move on to our first panel. The topic for this panel will be computer vision for media accessibility, here we aim to foster a discussion on the current state of computer vision techniques and focus on image recognition, identification, recognition of elements and text in web images and media, and considering all of the different usage scenarios that emerge on the web. We'll be looking here at aspects of how can we improve quality, how do we define quality for this, the quality and accuracy of the current computer vision techniques, and what are the opportunities and what are the future directions for this, in this domain.
We'll be joined by three panelists for this first panel. Amy Pavel, from the University of Texas, Shivam Singh, from mavQ and Michael Cooper, from the W3C. Great. Everyone is online, sharing their videos. Thank you all for agreeing to join. I will ask you before your first intervention to give a brief introduction to yourself to let people know who you are and what you're doing.
I would like to start on one of the issues with quality, how do we define quality here? I was looking at aspects such as how do we, or how can we train AI models that are able to identify aspects in an image, such as identity, emotion, appearance, which are particularly relevant for personal images. How can we get AI to do that, what we humans can do. I'll start with you, Amy.
>> AMY PAVEL: Excellent. Thank you so much. My name is Amy Pavel. I'm an assistant professor at UT Austin in the computer science department. I'm super excited to be here because a big part of my research is exploring how to create better descriptions for online media. I have worked everywhere from social medias, like describing images on Twitter as well as new forms of online media like GIFs, memes and I also worked on video, educational videos making the descriptions for lectures better as well as entertainment videos to improve the accessibility of user generated YouTube videos, for instance.
I think this question you bring up it is really important and I typically think about it in two ways. I think about what does our computer understand about an image, and then how do we express what the computer understands about an image or other form of media. So, I think that we're getting better and better at having computers that can understand more of the underlying image. For instance, we have gotten if we think about something like emotion, we have got an lot better at determining exact landmarks on the face, how they move, for instance, or we may be able to describe something specific about a person if you look at me, in this image, I have brown hair tied back into a bun and a black turtle neck on. This is a type of thing we might be able to understand using automated systems.
However, the second question is kind of how do we describe what we know about an image. If I gave you all of the information about my facial landmarks, what I'm wearing for every context, that may not be super useful. So a lot of what I think about, it is sort of how we can best describe or what people may want to know about an image given its context and the background of the user. Just briefly on that point, I usually think about who is viewing this image, what might they want to get out of it. Also, who is creating it? What did they intend to communicate? So, there are these two questions I think give us interesting ideas on what data we could use to train, to create better descriptions based on the context. For example, we might use descriptions that are actually given by people to describe their own images or their identities or aspects that they have shown in videos in the past. On the other hand, we might improve, we may use a bunch of different methods, and improve our ability to select a method based on the context of the image. For instance, when I worked on Twitter images, we would run things like captioning to describe the image like an image of a note may just say note. We also ran OCR to automatically extract the text and tried to pick the best strategy to give people, you know, what we thought may be the best amount of information given the image. That's my initial, I'm sure more aspects of this will come up as we have a conversation. I just wanted to give that as my first part of my answer. Yes.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much. Shivam, you want to go next?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Sure. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Shivam Singh. I lead the document based products at mavQ, India. It is a pleasure to be here with all of you. The question here, how should we train models dedicating on identifying aspects like identity, emotion, personal appearances. That is a two part answer.
I'm more of a technical background, I will go a bit of technical diversity here. Preparing a data on diversity, that's the first point. Most available data, it is from publicly available data. We can carefully plan and prepare the data before creating our models to include the weights for peripheral data of surrounding environment, like in an image, there can be a subject, and there can be a lot of careful data . If we train, choose an algorithm that take care of that peripheral data as well, that will be helpful in getting a better output. For example, you have a subject gesturing, its relation with the environment, and it is linking emotion to its external manifestation on our subjects area. This gives a more inclusive output, if you have a user, a person, it has a better identity, emotion, and appearance and there should be a […] where we could have a diverse dataset, not, but it is not totally depending on the availability of data.
The second part of it, it would be fine tuning the model based on personal preferences. Let's say you have a better, bigger model, right, you use that as a general model and then you can fine tune that based on the small, little, small scale trainings and smaller datasets and you can fine tune it together to have a better result. Now, this fine tuning, it is kind of a human in the loop feature, where every time you get the data you can expect some feedback on your data and then perform a better output effect. That's something which is a bit of, it involves some human intervention there. Yeah. That's how I see how we can train models.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Great. Thank you, Shivam. Michael.
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Hey. So my name is Michael Cooper, I work with the Web Accessibility Initiative. I'm speaking specifically from my role there, I'm not a machine learning professional, I'm not speaking about technology so much as some considerations for accessibility that I'm aware of for that. In terms of improving quality descriptions, the other two speakers spoke about, you know, technically how we do it. I think we may be able to give advice on some of what needs to be done. For instance, machine learning, the output should be able to conform to the media accessibility user requirements and the cognitive accessibility guidance, for instance, as sources of information about what will be useful to users.
I'm also thinking of machine learning more broadly in terms of what tools might be used in different circumstances and in particular, in the context as potential assistive technology. So the question for accessibility there is not just what is the description of this image, what was the image description in this page for me, for the purpose I'm seeking? You know, tools can get context from HML semantic, accessibility semantics like ARIA, and adaptive technology, they can also generate their own context from machine learning algorithms. I think there is going to be a need to have a way to communicate user preferences to machine learning, whether that is added to the semantics or something.
Let's see, just a couple of closing notes on that, users need to be involved in the design and training process, that's sort of something that needs to be repeated. You know, we have to pay attention to that as we look to improve that. I would also note that while this session is mainly focused on, you know, images and media, virtual, augmented reality has a lot of the same problems and solutions that we should be looking at.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Okay. Thank you for starting that discussion. One thing, I guess it was mentioned by all of you, in different ways, it is the role of the end user and in fact, I guess both users were mentioned, the one that is viewing or requiring the image or the description of the image, but also the one that's creating or sharing the image. For that one, there is the responsibility of generating a description and, of course, we know most people don't do that, so, that's why we also need these AI based systems to take on that role. But this leads me to another aspect, if we have an AI based system that's capable of assisting both the content creator and consumer, how does this impact the agency of end users? Will end users feel this is no longer their responsibility because there is a tool that can do this for them, or if we explore this as something that we're now looking at this from the content producer perspective, if we see this tool as something that helps someone generating a description, would this producer just start relying on the output from the AI and thinking about what Jutta had introduced earlier today, wouldn't the, and she mentioned this as an organizational mono culture, can we also think about the description mono culture, which all descriptions would start conveying the same kind of information. What's your perspectives on the impact that this has on the agency and end users? I will start with you.
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Awesome. It is a bit of a question. Let's say we're talking about the quality of our output based on the user, right, the end user. The quality of this description depends on how end users consume it. For example, most models currently provide high-level and grammatically correct captions in English, but that would not be true for captions generated in other native language of other users, it may not have enough of a dataset to train the model. Now, the premise of training restricts this diversity of generated captions and the use cases of what all things in the model it can comprehend and then generate the caption which includes, like, the diverse text like a diverse text, line an email, a date, or correctly explaining graphs, which is a big problem until now. Once a translation with AI is employed, how well it becomes an input is […], for example, you can have two different models, one is precise and a general one. The general output of a model can become an input for a specialized model for a model and then you can refine it. This is how we're now achieving it.
The other thing is the caption generated by AI consumes very large amounts of data to curate content, and in many cases of live caption generation, AI should put in context the earlier events or early inputs as well, and this is true for a context of the conversational bots, but this can be also a talk where you have a live caption generation. So you have to put some context there and then you have to generate the captions. Now, we have mature engines like GPT3, but this is more complex than a simple image to text generation, the speed, and handing of the peripherals, it is very much necessary. We're looking forward to a better solution where the end users are really satisfied with what they're getting.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you. Michael what about the perspective from the end users, the agency of end users from your point of view? I guess more the Web Accessibility Initiative role and how can we guide technical creators to ensure that end users remain with autonomy to, when creating this kind of content.
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Yeah. So ,first I would, you know, look at, you know, what are the ways in which the machine learning generated descriptions and captions increase user agency and there are ways to decrease that as well. For instance, although we would prefer that authors provide these features, if they don't, providing them via machine learning will help the user access the page and give them the agency that they're looking for in the task. Descriptions don't have to be perfect to provide that agency. That said, it is frustrating when they're not good enough, they can often mislead users and, you know, cause them to not get what they're looking for, spend time, et cetera. That's a way this can be a risk for users and, as you mentioned, there is likely to be a tendency for content developers to say machine descriptions are there, so we don't need to worry about it. You know, I think those are, you know, simply considerations that we have to pay attention to in our advocacy, in the education work in the field, also in documenting the best practices for machine learning. For instance, W3C has a publication called Ethical Principles for Web Machine Learning that talk about, they address accessibility considerations among others, and it is possible that the industry might want a documented set of ethical principles or a code of conduct that the industry organizations signed on to saying here's accessibility ethics and machine learning in addition to other ethics that we're paying attention to. Those could be ways that we can support the growth of user agency in the end of this. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you for that perspective and raising awareness to the information that the WAI group is making it available. I think that's really important for everyone else to know. Amy, what's your take on this, on the impact that these tools can have on the agency of end users?
>> AMY PAVEL: Yeah. So I might answer this briefly from the content creator side. Say you are out to make a description, how could we use AI to improve the description, improve the quality of descriptions and the efficiency, rather than sacrificing one for the other? I'll start with, I worked on tools a lot in this space. I'll kind of start with what hasn't worked in the past and then share some possibilities on things that work a little bit better. One thing that I worked on for quite a while has been creating user generated descriptions of videos. Video descriptions currently appear mostly in highly produced TV and film and they're quite difficult to produce yourself because they're sort of an art form. You have to fit the descriptions within the dialogue. They're really hard to make. So one thing we worked on is some tools to make it easier for people to create video descriptions by using AI. So, what didn't work was automatically generating these descriptions, the descriptions were often uninteresting, and they didn't provide quite the depth that the original content creator had included in the visual, in the visual information of the scene, if it is simple, a house, a tree, it may get it. If it was something domain specific or had something extra to it that you may want to share, it was completely missing. One thing we looked at, how to identify areas where people could add description, silences or how to identify things that were not described in the narration. At this point, the narration of the video talks about, is talking about something completely unrelated to the visual content. People may be missing out on that visual content.
Rather than trying to, like, automatically generate descriptions, I think one promising approach can be to identify places where people could put in descriptions or if they write a description, identify parts of the image that that description doesn't cover yet. I think that there is kind of some cool opportunities to use AI in unexpected ways to help people create better descriptions.
I'll briefly address the end user part. You know, if the user is lacking, so the person using the captions, the descriptions, if they're lacking information that can decrease the ability to have agency and responding to that information, right? If you give them all of the information, you know, in one, big, piece of Alt text, you may not give people much agency over what they're hearing or probably not matching with the cognitive accessibility guidelines that Michael had mentioned.
I have experimented with some ways to try to, like, maybe help people get agency over their descriptions, one thing we have played with a little bit, it is, you know, asking basically alerting people to the fact that there is a mismatch between the audio and visuals, for instance, in listening to a lecture, hey, the lecturer hasn't talked about this piece of text that's on the slide. Would you like to hear more about it? Then people can optionally hear a little bit more about it. That's something like OCR, automatically detecting text works quite well. There are these opportunities that you don't want to overwhelm people with information when they're doing a task that's not related, but there are some cool opportunities, I think, to give people control over when they get more information. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you, Amy. Before moving to the next question I have here, there is a follow up question on this by Matt Campbell on what you just mentioned, Michael. You mentioned descriptions not being good enough are a risk for user agency, what Matt is inquiring is how much can this be mitigated by just tagging the descriptions as automatically generated. Can you give a perspective on this, also, Amy, if you want to following Michael?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Yeah. I'll try to give a quick answer. So is the ARIA technology, accessible rich Internet applications, enhances HTML with the ability to point to a description elsewhere in the HML document rather than providing a simple alt text and that gives you the rich capability and we have that now in terms of identifying it is a machine generated description, we don't have a semantic for that, but that's the sort of thing that would get added to ARIA if the use case were emerging.
>> AMY PAVEL: Yeah. I will also, I'm happy to also answer this question, maybe I was looking at Matt's other question, kind of related, I think. Are there other alternatives that are richer than alt text alone? One thing we've looked at a little bit for, I worked a little bit on the accessibility of complex scientific images. What you end up with, it is complex multipart diagrams that if you try to describe in one single, you know, alt text field it performs quite badly. We're kind of starting to see, like, could we automatically break that big piece of alt text down to a hierarchy to match the image so that maybe people can more flexibly explore like they would basically an HTML version that sort of captures the structure of the image that people could explore. Kind of thinking about other ways to present all of the information that currently gets relegated sometimes to a single alt text into something that's a little bit more rich.
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Carlos, you're on mute.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thanks. What I was saying, since we have been coming always around to the topic of or to the concept of quality, also one question by Mark, Mark Urban, I think, it would be interesting to know what's your take on this. So is there a documented metric that measures the quality of an image description, and if there is, what would be the most important priorities for the defining quality. Amy, you want to go first?
>> AMY PAVEL: This is a hard question for me. I think that the answer is no. It is really a good, it is a really good question and something that we constantly sort of battle with. So, we kind of abused in our work, you have used a four point description, literally nothing, there is something in the description field but it is in no way related, there is something related to the image but it is missing some key points, and this covers most of the key points in the image. We kind of have been using this and what the values mean depends a lot on the domain and what task the person is using the image for. But it's been like... you know, we've used this in a couple of papers and it's just been like a way for us to, you know, make progress on this problem. and we have also tried to for each domain we're working in, kind of tried to inform it based on existing guidelines as well as literally the existing W3C guidelines and what users have told us about specific to that domain. I don't know of a good one. That's something that we just sort of worked around. It would be great to have more efforts on that in the future.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Definitely something that's more qualitative than quantitative, definitely. What you just described is a good way to start. So, Shivam, your take on the quality of image description?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Sure. So I guess when we come to industry set up, we have certain evaluation tools, we evaluate our models as well as the outputs, there's a rigorous testing that goes on, but there is no set of metrics that we have, but certainly we have some rules, we have W3C guidelines, we have some other guidelines as well that are in place. They are not set rules, but, yeah, we have tools as a yardstick and we can build that test based on that only. There can be some work done with that, yeah, certainly this is what we have currently.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Okay. Michael, Amy just mentioned, answered looking also at the definitions that W3C provide, do you want to add something on how can we measure quality of image descriptions?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: The only thing I would really add to what she said is, so, we produce resources like understanding WCAG, ,understanding the web content accessibility guidelines which goes into when you're writing the image descriptions, what are the considerations, how do you make a good one. A big challenge for machine learning I think, in particular, it is the quality, the appropriate description for an image would depend very much on the context. We described several different contexts in the support materials and, yeah, the right description for one is the wrong one for another. Sorting that out, I think it is one of the big challenges beyond what others have said.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Yeah. Definitely. I have to agree with you. Apparently we're losing Shivam intermittently and he's back!
I'm going to combine two questions that we have here in the Q&A, and the one from Jan Benjamin and the other from Wilco Fiers. It is more about qualifying images than really generating descriptions for the image. Jan asked can AI differentiate between, for example, functional and decorative images rather than just generating a description, just differentiating between an image that needs a description and one that doesn't? And Wilco asks if it is viable to spot images where automated captions will likely be insufficient, so that content authors can focus on those and leave the AI to caption, to describe others that might be easier for them. Amy, want to go first?
>> AMY PAVEL: Sure. Yeah. I love both of these questions. I would say to Jan's question, I don't think, you know, when the question is can AI do this, you know, we have tried this a little bit for slide presentations. The answer is yes to some extent. It will fail some places. To give you an idea of how, you know, AI could help may help detect decorative from non decorative, from more informative images, like in the context of a slide presentation, it is informative images might be more complex, they might be more related to the content on the rest of the slide and in the narration. Informative, they might be larger on the screen and decorative on the slides might be, you know, like little decorations on the sides, they may be logos, or like emojis, or less related to the content on the screen. What we have found out, we can do a decent job at this, but it will fail in some cases always. Like maybe an image is included, but there is no other information about it and it is tricky. In doing this, you want to be overly inclusive of the images you identified as informative so that maybe you could help content authors make sure that they at least review most of the images.
I would say to Wilco yeah, that's a great idea. We have tried it a little bit on Twitter. One time we ran basically a bunch of different AI methods to try to describe images on Twitter, and so for each image we try to run captioning OCR, we did this URL tracing to see if we could find a caption elsewhere on the web and basically if all of those had low confidence, or they didn't return anything, then we kind of automatically sent the image to get more human written descriptions. Another thing we explored, users optionally, retrieving the description. It is possible. The subtleties that are there, they're difficult to view automatically. At least that was a way, given how many images were on Twitter without descriptions, it was sort of a way to filter out the ones we definitely need to get more information from a human. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Great. Thank you for sharing those experiences. Shivam?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: I guess I have been in contact with this scenario, where I had to get descriptions of images that most likely will not get very sufficient on a machine description. So there are ways, tools that can do that for you, on websites, there are multiple plug ins to use. You can give certain descriptions and people can put certain human descriptions over there. To mark them, to spot them in a scalable manner, it sometimes does not become scalable. That's the whole issue. You can have a tool, it may not be scalable for every user out there, every website out there. This can be done, but, yeah, again, there are instances where it can be used and where it can't. The technology, that's the answer, how to scale it, that's the question.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Great. Thank you. Michael, do you have any input on this?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: No. Not on this one.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Okay. That takes me back to one question that I had here, taking this opportunity to go back there. I will start with you, Michael. It's going in a different direction than what we have been going so far. How do you think that we need to deal with legal copyright and responsibility issues when generating descriptions with AI based models? How do we tackle that?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Yeah. Okay. You know, also, you know, not speaking as a legal professional, but issues that I know about, in general, at least for accessibility, there is often a fair use, the right to transform content, but I'll circle back to that, but, you know, that's the first question, but then there are issues around accuracy. If a machine has generated a caption or description, you know, how accurate is that description, who knows how accurate it is, and also publishing it, especially with potential accuracies can bring on liability consequences even if the use is otherwise allowing that publication.
Another, you know, challenge, it is meeting requirements. If accuracy is high, pretty high, but still not quite right, if it is a legal document, it may not be sufficient, so depending on the accuracy of these kind of descriptions is going to be a vague, you know, legal challenge for a bunch of different directions. Of course, you know, there is the benefit, the reason to do it, this still can be better than nothing for many users, you know, who get used to some of the inaccuracies and it does provide scalability given how image and video focused our web has become. I would highlight one of the ethical principles from the ethical machine learning document is that it should be clear that the content is machine generated allowing many actors to evaluate it.
Circling back to fair use, I think who is doing the generating, or publishing machine learning content will probably impact that if it is a user agent and assistive technology, it is probably covered by fair use. If the content producer is doing, they're probably declaring fair use for themselves but the responsibility for accuracy, it will be higher for them because they're now the publisher. There are third party agents of various sorts, accessibility, remediation tools, other sorts, where I assume it is a legal wild west.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Definitely. To make it worse, I guess, there are many wild wests because every country, every region might have different legal constraints there. Shivam, any take on this?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Yeah. So I have a holistic view of how technical this has been. This was when this is an ongoing issue with a lot of countries now. You see almost all publicly available data sets, right... These are the data that are associated in some or other form as a copyright one. There is no frame, in most part of the world that deals with the legality of the generated captions, there is no written law in any place, or it might be coming later, maybe in the U.S. first. This is a complexity these are some complexities. The owning of the AI owners of the data, if it is a machine generated data, who will be owning that data? The industry that built that model or the dataset that has been gathered from different data sources. This is a very complex challenge.
The other part of it, how would you fix the responsibility? To keep that in mind, it depends on the end user of the model. When you use it, in what context are you using it? For example, some of the models that are used in academia, these are just for the research and development purposes, there is no way where you can fix the responsibility on the academy of work. These are the this is helping in two ways. This is how you source the data, either you have to get text on the data, where it is coming from, you gather the data, based on written sources, you have the mutual understanding between the data creator and you, then you train on the data. That gives you a complexity where you have the small dataset and there is a large input going in the training to the data. These are the complexities currently and yeah, it all depends on where the model or audit is being used. That's where the fair use policy comes.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Context all the way in all scenarios, right? Amy.
>> AMY PAVEL: I'm not as familiar with the legal and copyright side of this. I think, you know, oftentimes I do think about the responsibility aspects of the captions that we're generating, especially when doing these kind of new forms of we're generating things like user generated media. This more goes back to the potential harms brought up in the keynote. For instance, I think one thing I'm often thinking about, when are errors not that big of a deal and when are they a bigger deal? Kind of looking at their risks and trade offs in terms of who like who is receiving the image and who who is getting identified by the tool and who is receiving the image. For instance, if you misidentified my shirt as dark blue rather than black, this error is unlikely to be as harmful to me, but for some people might experience misgendering them with image classification to be harmful. Two ways of dealing with this, you know, not to say that either of them is good right now, one, a lot of tools back off the same person, rather than saying women or man. Another way that you could imagine doing it, it is describing physical characteristics of the person that are less subjective and a final way you may imagine doing it, it is considering people's own identifications of how they would like to be described. Sometimes that varies in different contexts. That itself is a hard problem. Yeah. I don't have much to say on the legal, copyright side, I wanted to bring up that's something that's come up in my work before.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much. We're almost at the end. We have less than 10 minutes, and questions keep coming. That's great. You will have the opportunity, I guess, to guess try to answer some of them offline if you wish to. I'll still take another one. The last one we have here, it is Antonio Gambabari. The question is how do you envision the challenges of explainable AI initiatives in the context of image recognition. This relates to several of the aspects that we have dealt with, with the uncertainty of images and how to convey that to users, just by labeling something as automatically generated, would it be a way to convey that. Do you think that explainable AI initiatives have the potential to improve this kind of augmented context for the user and where did the description came from. This time, I'll start with you.
>> SHIVAM SINGH: I think, yes. It is a good point. Explainable AI initiative, it deals with how metadata can help the end user to know the context of what's being generated, any quantitative score on any of the models , it is supported by a lot of data going beyond your training. Right. There is a restriction though, whatever things you're getting an output, the metadata can, there are multiple layers of training if you look at the training. There are multiple layers of training. How it is made by AI, it gives a different level of metadata but not all. It could augment the user but that won't be the complete solution. That's how I see it.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Amy, any thoughts on this.
>> AMY PAVEL: Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. I think some things, one thing I would think about a little bit in this, and I have had to think about before, it is sort of, like, the trade off between receiving information efficiently and explaining where you got all of that information from. I think both are important. I think maybe, like what my experience has been, users are used to certain different types of errors and can recover from them quickly. For instance, like when a user is reviewing their own content, for example, they took picture, video, and they hear something described as a leash. I have had the experience of users being like, Oh no, that's my cane, it always calls my cane a leash. In some cases, people can get used to identifying the errors for the known unknowns. This is just a wrong identification, I'm used to it. I think it is harder to recover from errors that are unknowns, unknowns. There are no other contexts about it, you don't know what else it could be. Maybe in the cases where the users haven't identified it before that confidence, that information is extra important and so, yeah, not really sure what the answer is. I think that considering the balance between what is important and to know more information about this, will be a tricky design question, a question for how to develop technology.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Great. Thank you. Michael, any input on this one?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: No. I would just add to all that, you know, this again falls into the question of ethics, transparency and explainability, it is one of the section of the machine learning ethics and addresses several aspects of knowing how the machine learning was built, it should be auditable for various issues. These ethics are probably less specific to some of the use cases that we're discussing in the symposium so there may be room for adding to this section of the document.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Yeah. Yeah. I think that may be a good idea. I'll take just a final one, going back to the topic, one from Matt, it is something that we have touched upon before. I'll mention you this, Michael, we have mentioned this already in the scope of ARIA, the question is about having richer alternatives for the image description, to the standard alt text, which is usually short. What are the thoughts on the usefulness of having richer descriptions for image alternatives.
>> MICHAEL COOPER: As far as the general idea in terms of the usefulness of making use of richer descriptions. So, for very simple images, as for the way that the web has started, images were largely providing small functional roles, things were sufficient for many cases, images are now used nowadays for a variety of purposes and some are reducible to an alt, like a photo of my dog, it is not really providing the experience. You know, there is definitely a need for richer alternatives and longer alternatives, ones with structures to skim them, depending on the context, ones that you can provide links to the necessary bits of alternative data, the question about images on charts, often the description for a chart is much more structured semantically than for other kinds of images, and you want to be able to take advantage of a rich text mark up. I believe that assistive technology, they're supporting, you know, rich text descriptions whenever available, it is a question of getting people to use them more. For machine learning generated, I would rather than do richer rather than less rich output.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Yeah. Following up on that , for Shivam and for Amy, by having richer and longer descriptions, are we increasing the chances that AI generated descriptions will mess up or isn't that a risk? Who wants to start? Amy?
>> AMY PAVEL: Sure. I think we're definitely I agree, oftentimes the more detailed that you get, the more opportunities there are for errors. A way we have kind of explored this a little bit, is seeing bring especially for very informative images, that maybe a lot of people will see, we thought of how to combine automated tools with human written descriptions to hopefully make some of the descriptions better, maybe automated tools could help you help automatically extract the structure of the image and humans go in to write more detail about the parts of the image that are really unlikely to be fully described by the computer. For now, the way I think about the complex images, it is often in a how are we going to help humans create descriptions more efficiently by still maintaining high quality, rather than thinking of how to do it fully automatically based on the images I have looked at in the past. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you. Shivam, any input?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: I think the inspiration behind this question would be to give us structure to the output. So it is a structured output that makes more sense than to have a fallback estimate. You can provide more information to the output but the output would, should be shorter and more explainable, it may be grammatically incorrect, that could make more sense to the end user and he may have another option to explain that. It's not like you have a string generated out of an image, right? When you read out to a screen, right, it should concisely read it, short, briefly. And for more description, there should be some other excellent data can be supplied to it. And then there are multiple ways we can do this. But the description of an ultimate should remain concise and grammatically correct. So that screen readers can try to read it, but that's how I see it.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Okay. Thank you so much. And I want to thank the three of you once more for agreeing to take part in this panel, also for agreeing to take part in the next panel. So as we can see, media accessibility, it's really a rich topic and definitely computer generated descriptions are also linked with natural language processing. So what that will be the topic for the next panel in just under 10 minutes. So we'll have a coffee break now and I hope everyone's enjoying, and we'll be back at ten past the hour.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Welcome to the second panel of the first day. This panel will aim to discuss the current status of natural language processing techniques, and, here in the context of the web we can think or, we know that they can be used to generate textual descriptions for images and also for other visual media presented on webpages. We'll focus today our discussion or, or start to consider aspects such as providing understandable text to better meet web user needs and the different contexts of use, and also what are future perspectives for natural language processing on web accessibility or to support web accessibility. I'm glad to welcome back Michael, Shivam and Amy, there you are, Amy!. Also to welcome Shaomei Wu from Almpower.org who agreed to join us on the second panel of the day. I welcome you all back, welcome, Shaomei. For the first intervention, I ask you to briefly introduce yourself, your three other copanelists have already done that in the previous panel. No need to reintroduce yourselves.
I will start by thinking about once again the quality, we go back to the quality topic and now the quality of machine generated descriptions and now no longer from the perspective of image processing but from the perspective of the natural language generation. How do we improve the quality of the machine generated descriptions, especially taking into account the personalized preferences from users. I will start with you, Shaomei.
>> SHAOMEI WU: Thank you all for having me here today, my name is Shaomei Wu, and right now I'm the founder and CEO of Almpower.org, a non profit that researches and cocreates in empowering technology for marginalized users and first of all, I want to also share that I do have a stutter. You may hear that there'll be more pauses when I talk. Before Almpower.org, I was a research scientist at Facebook leading a lot of research and product work on accessibility, inclusion, equity. One of the products that I shipped was automatic alt text, a feature that provided short and machine generated description of images on Facebook and Instagram to screen reader users in realtime.
When it comes to quality of automated Alt text and other familiar systems, we saw two biggest areas of development that we wanted to do. The first one is accuracy, which I think we talked a lot about in the last panel as well and I want to talk a bit more about the second one which is the richness of the descriptions. To be honest, what we generated, the alt text, it was quite limited, and a lot of users, many say it is more of a teaser, oh, yeah, people smiling, pizza, indoor, but no more than that. What kind of environment is it? Is it a home? Is it a restaurant? So I think our users, they really wanted kind of get all kind of all the richness of someone who has eyesight can see, can handle the access.
One particular kind of area that users want to know more, it is about people, who they are, how do they look like, race, gender, even how attractive they are, because that is something that's socially salient. That was a kind of a big challenge for us, when we were designing our system because, like how can we share those kind of attributes in the most accurate, and kind of socially conscience way. We actually chose not to show the race and the gender of the people being photographed, which we got a lot of complaints on, but how to kind of look at this in a socially respectful way and I think it is you know, we should really work on this and now I can see handling a few ways that we can make that better. For example considering the relationship between kind of people in the photo and viewers, for example, like if they're friends, then we can put in the name, you know, other things about those people, and another thing, it is kind of to give progressive details, so to have some kind of an option to kind of allow the consumer to kind of request more details that we cannot just provide by our systems. I will be done here and allow other panelists to talk.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you, Shaomei Wu. Shivam, your thoughts on how can we improve the quality of machine generated descriptions?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: This is a two part thing. When you come to technically implementing models, how you have designed the model, how you have trained them, and who are the stakeholders of designing a particular model, it is very much necessary and how they're going to get the quality machine generated description. When we take into account users personalized preferences, this is two parts. Let's first take an example. I am a person who knows Spanish, right, my model, a very famous model, it gives descriptions in English. So now the model, whatever the consumption of the model is, let's say you use an API to consume the model. That should take into account the personalized preferences of the users of the language and write the output based on that as well. This diversity of model to prepare output in multiple formats and languages, it is something that can be looked into, this is how the quality of machine generated description increases. Now, you did not train the complete model separately. What you can do is to create post-processing scripts for the models and that can help end users. There is not much of an effort when we say as a model training input, it is a simple solution to what can be the solution.
The other thing is, how you prepare the quality data. You should fully and carefully categorize it, the structure of the data, if needed, and let's say you have input data that are blurred images and all sorts of this.. You have to carefully prepare the model and train the data, and based on that, the description would be a bit more clear and the personalization would also be affected when you look into how you can post process the data for certain groups of people. That's how I see it.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you. Amy, want to share your experiences.
>> AMY PAVEL: Sure. A couple of ways that I have seen that are sort of promising to use NLP to improve quality, one thing I have seen recently, people starting to consider context around the image that's going to be described to maybe create a description that's more helpful. Imagine someone writes a post on Twitter, and they have coupled that post with an image. Considering the post and the image together, maybe it may inform models on how to create something that's more informative. For instance, if I posted a picture of myself snowboarding, I said I learned a new trick, then it may be important to tell me what trick you learned. Whereas on the other hand, I said I just went on vacation, you know, the exact trick may not matter as much. I think that the idea of, like, using language understanding to get more information about the context before making a prediction is promising.
Another way I have sort of seen it used to maybe improve the quality, it goes back to the other answers that were given. Maybe you can use question answering about the image to gain more information when you need it. One thing I have also thought about, it is seeing if maybe users could give examples of their preferences about descriptions in natural language. This is an example of a description, maybe we can copy the style of this description when we're applying it to other descriptions. Maybe I like to hear about the costumes someone wears in a video and I wish that future descriptions could include more information about that rather than summarizing them.
Finally, one other way, I have used NLP to improve quality, it is also based on summarization. So there can be times when there is more to describe than time to describe it, especially videos, there is often a really small amount of time to describe without overlapping the other audio. One way you can use NLP to improve that quality, it is by trying to summarize the descriptions so that they fit within the time that you have. They don't decrease the experience of people trying to watch the video and hear the audio at the same time. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Yeah. That's a good use for NLP. Michael, still on this topic, I would like to have your perspective on initiatives on WAI that may assist users in providing their preferences, so that eventually models can use those for anything that may be ongoing in that regard.
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Yeah. First of all, to repeat this, for anyone doing this session that I'm not a machine learning professional, I'm speaking from my perspective of the work on the Web Accessibility Initiative. I want to talk briefly, other panelists covered almost anything that I would have said. One thing that, based on my knowledge of how machine learning works generally today, and models tend to be focused on, you know, a particular ability and it is not universal and in the future AI models will have more abilities combined and so there may be more than one model recognizing this is a human, here are the attributes, another one saying that is this human, and another one that can say this human plus that human equals this relationship. All of that information I believe is separate right now. The ability for models to share context, it is going to be the part of the solution that we need.
What I can speak of from the Web Accessibility Initiative, we are only beginning to explore what AI and accessibility means and this symposium is part of that process. We have a practice of doing research papers, sort of literature reviews and then proposing accessibility user requirements. That would be something that we could be working on to start gathering this information and from there we decide what to do with it, does it go in guidelines, new technologies, whatever. I think most of the resources around AI would fit into new resources for those categories.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thanks. I would like to now move on to addressing something that was at the core of the keynote, discriminating bias, or any other sort of bias. Here looking at something that's been entered in the Q&A for the previously panel but I think it is also very well, it fits well into this topic, and it brought out the use of large language models (LLMs) which are currently getting a lot of attraction and a lot of spotlight. Do you think this LLM can open up new avenues, Antonio Gambabari mentioned for reducing different types of bias that we see as a result of the use, of AI training models? Shivam, you want to go first this time?
>> SHIVAM SINGH: Yeah. Sure. Sure. This is quite a question, which has been close to my heart as well, how to address social bias in Large Language Models. Right. We have seen a lot of trainings on this, so socializing this, this is also data that they have been trained on, how the social attitude is of the data presented within that model. Most of the available data, it is used to train models and we use old ones, containing a certain degree of bias, most of the data generated on the Internet, it is basically those, people who can consume it, it is not everybody, some don't even know what the Internet is, they cannot create data over there. Most of the data available to train the model is based out of that. That's how you see the bias in one way.
The other instance I can give an example, you will see a lot of violence, homelessness, other things, all of those things are over represented in the text and that's, these are both not similar, but you will find these kinds of representations in the LLM outputs. How to address this, there is another way of human in the loop feedback on existing models where you provide some feedback to the already existing model, that this is the sort of output that's not correct, this can be a correct version, this can be another version. Some human interface is needed with that. Now, this aspect of the data, it is a representation of the models now and the underlying data of model, the main source of the issue here. You need to correctly source the data and correctly structure the data so that you're not over representing one section of data, for example, let's say that you have a bigger society and the society can be underprivileged, over privileged, maybe other sections of the society. You cannot just take the data from one section of society and train that model and say this is a picture of this particular area. There are many areas underrepresented, that's happening with all of the models at the start of LLM you can see.
Now, what we can also do to mitigate this, you can create an inclusive workflow and develop the models and the designing of that model and you give the inclusive workflow training to them, you get them aware of what's happening and what and how to mitigate this. All of the persons who are included in the generation, there is a lot going on, a lot of data extraction goes on. All of these people can be trained for inclusiveness. There are multiple tools that help to us do that. Like, if you're creating a model, you can test that and Google helps us, Google has the tools, how the models are performing when you talk about a lot of inclusive outputs of the data. Also, you need to do a thorough testing of the models when you go ahead to include tha,t all of the outputs, they're properly aligned and properly represented, all of the sections of the model which it is intended to be used, it should be represented well. The testing, it should be there in case of any models that you're creating. Now we have noted that we're at the stage that AI and LLMs, they're quite mature right now and we're seeing a lot of data technologies and we can do this going forward, I guess this can be a solution.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you, Shivam. Shaomei, can I have your input on how can we address social bias or other types of bias?
>> SHAOMEI WU: Yeah. So on these, I want to kind of go back to what I had talked about before, in particular on the sensitive social identities about people on the photos. I don't see a good way for the current machine learning system to accurately come out with those labels. The key kind of issues here, it is a lot of those systems, they really assume these like fixed social categorizations such as race and gender. I think maybe we should think beyond the machine learning systems and kind of find the way to kind of attribute people respectfully through, you know, having the agencies, of those being photographed and being described. For example, I think now a lot of people has been kind of intensifying their pronouns in their social media bios, all of this information should be made use of or should be kind of made use of when assigning on the way that we're describing the gender of somebody in the photo.
We have the other directions that we have been exploring, it is sort of describing the appearances instead of identities. For example, kind of describing skin tones or hairstyle and outfit instead of assigning a kind of race or a gender label of somebody. I don't think any of those solutions can really adjust the kind of the real cause of the problem, so I don't really have a very good answer on this. I think maybe we should, maybe the alternative, is to kind of think of a way to come away and kind of share who we are., so much relying on the images like we are today. You know, how can we convey the information that we want to share online in a not so visual centric way. I think that's kind of a bigger question.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you, Shaomei Wu. Amy, next, to you
>> AMY PAVEL: I think that the prior answers mostly covered the things I was going to mention. I loved Shaomei Wu's answer about describing ourselves in ways, or like figuring outweighs that don't rely on the visual information and giving agency to people to add their own identities that they want to be shared. I will say that I think that depends in different context, you may want to share different parts of your identity if it is important to you and you might, I think, even things that give end users agency may have a lot of subtlety and how they would be applied in different cases. I like the idea of describing, you know, aspects of appearance. I think you're missing one challenge with that, you might be sort of trading off between these aspects of appearance that you're describing and the efficiency with which someone can, like, maybe they're not going to get the information as quickly as a sighted person would perceiving that person and just because, you know, audio occurs over time. I think that it is an extremely difficult challenge and in some cases it can matter, like I can imagine, you know, seeing a photograph of the leadership of a company, you may want to know some quick details about the demographics of who is leading it for instance?
One thing, I have noticed, it is that it is sort of related to this. You know, when I'm, when I'm asking, so I sometimes, you know, have people describe videos. There can be a lot of differences in which aspects, even if they're going to describe the aspects of someone's appearance, the way they describe those based on who is in front of them can also differ based on biases people have. So if people see a women, they may describe her differently than they would describe a man, they may focus on different aspects of appearance and different things going towards describing aspects of appearance will have to be very carefully designed and it feels like a challenging problem. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much, Amy. Michael, any thoughts on this and I would add something here, especially for you, it is that do you see any future role of accessibility guidelines in contributing to preventing bias in machine learning generated descriptions or whatever results in these models.
>> MICHAEL COOPER: I have an answer for that question, it could be longer than my prepared answers. Let's see where we go. I would like to add a couple of thoughts to what others have been saying, I want to first categorize bias, we're talking so far of being labeled bias in recognition, is there biases of how machine learning recognizes objects, people, et cetera, context, and in that, one thing that magnifies this challenge, in accessibility context, it is that the sample size of People with Disabilities can be smaller in various training sets and there is a risk that, you know, images of People with Disabilities, the training set, contexts that are important for them, wheelchair ramps, something, it will be excluded as outliers or will be less well recognizable by the AI than, you know, the images of other people.
You know, that's just another, another added dimension to the aspects that we need to look at. We also need to look at the bias in the application of this. You know, we have talked a few times during the session about the risk of relying on machine generated descriptions and captions as being good enough, whereas content that has more mainstream audience may also have captions and descriptions that get more curated in what you will call assurance. That kind of bias could creep in and that can magnify the impact on disability bias because it can cause people to be excluded from the fora that, from which people are recruited to be part of training sets, et cetera. So again, the ethical principles of where machine learning speaks to that, and I think we may be identifying some content that we need to add to that.
Moving on to what WAI can do about that, you know, I do believe it is within the scope of the Web Accessibility Initiative, or the W3C to provide guidance in some form about how AI and accessibility should work together addressing many of these things. You know, typically, this sort of thing would be a Working Group note which means it is a formal document published by the W3C that has a certain level of review. There is even opportunities for versions that have had more review and sign off. I think that's one thing we may need to do.
I will talk briefly about the work that we're doing on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, sorry, the W3C accessibility guidelines or WCAG3, it is a substantial re-envisioning and it has been a clarifier since the beginning that he want to address , that we want to address equity in the guidelines, how to make sure they're equitable to People with Disabilities. We have explored that in certain ways in the Working Group really unpacking that, understanding the relationship with equity, accessibility, bias and other dimensions. That's turning, you know, we're connecting that with other work W3C has been doing to make itself more equitable of an organization and, you know, this is to say that I believe that WCAG3 will have some structure built in and support resources addressing the issues of bias specifically. These are hopes, not promises, but, you know, that's the direction from activities like this.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much. Those are exciting avenues we hope will come to fruition in the near future. I guess final question for everyone, and it is I would like to know a bit about your future perspectives on the use of Natural Language Processing for the field or in the field of accessibility. I will start with you this time, Amy.
>> AMY PAVEL: I think this is an exciting area. One thing, one shift I have found recently among people in NLP I talk to, as models are getting better at creating fluent text that looks reasonable that a lot of people are becoming more interested in what are the actual applications of this and how can we build tools that support these applications, rather than relying on automated metrics and that may not capture people's experiences. I wanted to note that that's a direction that I find exciting. A couple of things that could be promising and I mentioned them in other response, you know, as we gain the ability to describe more and more about the image, I think that NLP can provide a really good opportunity to personalize those descriptions based on the person and what they want as well as the context. There is, if you think about walking in a room, there is so much you could possibly describe, if we could make it easier for people getting the information they're looking for quickly from their media, that would be a great improvement and, you know, combining computer vision to recognize things in the underlying image and using something like NLP to summarize that description I think is promising and exciting.
Another way I think I'm excited about it, it is opportunities to maybe help people with their own description tasks. When we have humans working on descriptions, it is really hard. You know, novices sometimes have a hard time remembering and applying the guidelines that exist. Maybe we could rewrite people's descriptions of videos to be more in line with how an expert would write them by making them more concise or changing the grammar a bit so that it fits what people are expecting from their guidelines, or we may alert people to aspects of their own descriptions that may need, that could be changed a little bit to perhaps reduce something like bias that they have in a description. There is really lots of exciting opportunities in terms of authoring descriptions as well as making the end descriptions a little bit better. Yeah.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Great, thanks a lot. Shivam.
>> SHIVAM SINGH: I see a bit more of an opportunity now than earlier because now model engines are advanced. I see a good context aware solution giving you faster processing of data and it works on text, videos and audio. This could be a reality. A good use case I have been following also, it is how to make the academic textbooks, academic assignments, they have multiple graph, all associated data, if some models could create better understanding of those things, it would help a lot of people in understanding who has difficulties, or maybe in absence of good quality descriptions of these charts, I see this happening in the next few years. As a closing comment, I would say there are different sets of consumers of media, right. Some can read but not comprehend, some can comprehend easily and have difficulty consuming it visually. In that sense, the coming, NLP technology, it would help designers of contextual description of outputs and that I will say in simple terms, if you give me a simple efficient output that's familiar, aesthetic, it would be the pinnacle of what I see as NLP. These are for natural language processing, understanding as well as generation for all technologies.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you. Exciting times ahead, definitely. Michael, you want to share your vision?
>> MICHAEL COOPER: Based on my knowledge of how machine learning and how present day works, the tools tend to be more focused on specific abilities which means that the context is isolated. I think I'm speaking more of the person working in the field, recognizing a need that may not be a technological potential, but in the Internet of Things used as APIs to exchange data between different types of devices and if we can model some structure and share context with each other, the tools, and negotiate a better group description, I think that may be an opportunity for early evolution of this field. Long term, of course, tools will emerge with greater sense of context built in, but that will probably be another tier/similarity/whatever, that's my view on the near term future based on my knowledge.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Good suggestions to look at also. Shaomei.
>> SHAOMEI WU: Yeah. Looking into the future, I can see kind of two areas that I think will have a lot of potentials. First one, it is from the technology perspectives which I agree with my colleagues, I see a lot of gain in kind of incorporating the context surrounding photos and by taking advantage of the recent progress in deep learning models that handles the modal representations spaces. So we can embed both the image as well as the kind of text surrounding it and then going through the metadata, the author, you have the time where the photo was taken or posted. A lot of those, they can be kind of joined and represented in a sufficient space that provides us a lot more than just visual information alone. I think that's kind of a big technology breakthrough that we can see in the near term future. The kind of second thing, I think it is more important to me, it is a use case perspectives. I think right now when we think about or talk about the media accessibility, we are mostly thinking about the consumption case, how do we help somebody that cannot see to kind of, to consume the photos that are posted by others, and mostly posted by sighted folks. I think it is equally important but largely kind of overlooked, it is a media creation use cases, so how can we support people with visual impairment to create and to kind of share photos and videos.
In my own work, into these use cases, which is why there is such a gap in what the current technology can do, for example, all of the modern AI models, they really failed when it came to processing photos taken by people with visual impairments because they're just not in the same kind of photo that are used and share. You know, there is a huge gap in what kind of current, like, the current fundamentals of those models and what they can do. Then second, it is there is a need for a lot more personalized and aesthetic needs. I take 10 selfies, I want to find the one that I want to post to kind of share who I am and that is , we cannot do, you know, we can kind of tell you, okay, you have ten photos, and they are all kind of containing your face inside, but then how can we share the models that really kind a represent somebody's taste and somebody's kind of aesthetics and that's another interesting future development that I want to see. That's all.
>> CARLOS DUARTE: Thank you so much, Shaomei Wu. I think we only have 4 minutes more. I won't risk another question because we need to end at the top of the hour. I will take the opportunity to once again thank our panelists. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. It was really interesting, very optimistic perspectives so that we can see that it is not just the more risky or risk enabling outputs that AI can have. It is nice to have this perspectives. Thank you once again, Shivam Singh, Amy Pavel, Shaomei Wu, Michael Cooper, it was brilliant to have you here.
Thanks, everyone who attended. We'll be back tomorrow starting at the same time, 3:00 p.m. Central European time. I thank you to those attending especially on the West Coast of the U.S. where it is really early and also India, I guess it is the other way around, right, where it is really late, Shivam, thank you all for joining. So as I was saying, tomorrow we'll start at the same time, we'll have another two panels, first panel on machine learning for web accessibility evaluation and in the second panel we will come back to the topic of natural language processing but now focusing on accessible communication and we'll close with what I'm sure will be another really interesting keynote, from Shari, and looking forward to a similar discussion between Shari and Jutta Treviranus at the end of the keynote. Thank you again, Jutta Treviranus, for your informative, provoking keynote. I hope to see you all tomorrow. Good bye!