RE-centric Recommendations for the Development of Trustworthy(er) Autonomous Systems

Complying with the EU AI Act (AIA) guidelines while developing and implementing AI systems will soon be mandatory within the EU. However, practitioners lack actionable instructions to operationalise ethics during AI systems development. A literature review of different ethical guidelines revealed inconsistencies in the principles addressed and the terminology used to describe them. Furthermore, requirements engineering (RE), which is identified to foster trustworthiness in the AI development process from the early stages was observed to be absent in a lot of frameworks that support the development of ethical and trustworthy AI. This incongruous phrasing combined with a lack of concrete development practices makes trustworthy AI development harder. To address this concern, we formulated a comparison table for the terminology used and the coverage of the ethical AI principles in major ethical AI guidelines. We then examined the applicability of ethical AI development frameworks for performing effective RE during the development of trustworthy AI systems. A tertiary review and meta-analysis of literature discussing ethical AI frameworks revealed their limitations when developing trustworthy AI. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations to address such limitations during the development of trustworthy AI.

Automotive Perception Software Development: An Empirical Investigation into Data, Annotation, and Ecosystem Challenges

Software that contains machine learning algorithms is an integral part of automotive perception, for example, in driving automation systems. The development of such software, specifically the training and validation of the machine learning components, require large annotated datasets. An industry of data and annotation services has emerged to serve the development of such data-intensive automotive software components. Wide-spread difficulties to specify data and annotation needs challenge collaborations between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and their suppliers of software components, data, and annotations. This paper investigates the reasons for these difficulties for practitioners in the Swedish automotive industry to arrive at clear specifications for data and annotations. The results from an interview study show that a lack of effective metrics for data quality aspects, ambiguities in the way of working, unclear definitions of annotation quality, and deficits in the business ecosystems are causes for the difficulty in deriving the specifications. We provide a list of recommendations that can mitigate challenges when deriving specifications and we propose future research opportunities to overcome these challenges. Our work contributes towards the on-going research on accountability of machine learning as applied to complex software systems, especially for high-stake applications such as automated driving.