Provenance-driven and Legally-grounded Explanations for Automated Decisions (PLEAD)

PLEAD brings together an interdisciplinary team of technologists, legal experts, commercial companies and public organisations to investigate how provenance can help explain the logic that underlies automated decision-making to the benefit of data subjects as well as help data controllers to demonstrate compliance with the law.

Explanations that are provenance-driven and legally-grounded will allow data subjects to place their trust in automated decisions and will allow data controllers to ensure compliance with legal requirements placed on their organisations.

Project Aims

• We will identify various types of meaningful explanations for algorithmic decisions in relation to their purposes, categorise them against the legal requirements applicable to UK businesses relating to data protection, discrimination and financial services.
• We will conceive explanation-generating algorithms that process, summarise and abstract provenance logged by automated decision-making pipelines.
• An Explanation Assistant tool will be created for data controllers to provision their applications with provenance-based explanations capabilities.

Throughout the project, we will engage with partners, data subjects, data controllers, and regulators via interviews and user studies to ensure the explanations are fit for purpose and meaningful.

https://plead-project.org/