Twenty20Insight

As digital technology permeates every area of modern life, we risk becoming over-dependent on complex systems that operate in an opaque way, creating a risk that they exhibit emergent properties that adversely affect their users or their wider environment. This is particularly true as developers increasingly rely on AI or ML techniques as a means to define system behaviour when the problem space is too complex or poorly understood for human developers to explicitly specify that behaviour. We are tackling incompletely understood problems by developing systems whose behaviour and wider impact are by necessity also incompletely understood. This trend, which is largely enabled by an abundance of data harvested from (e.g.) mobile devices, sensors and social media, is radically changing how systems are developed and how they are used. We need a new approach to software engineering that

(i) places greater emphasis on making explicit the risks of unintended behaviour for innovative new software products either through limitations on our understanding of the envisioned product's behaviour or through misuse, and

(ii) actively supports explainability of the exposed behaviour by the running system.

Twenty20Insight is an interdisciplinary project bringing together academic experts in Software Engineering (SE), RE, Design Thinking and ML to help system stakeholders and developers understand and reason about the impact of intelligent systems on the world in which they operate.

We expect the project to have a major impact on five classes of beneficiaries beyond the academic research community:

Industrial partners. Twenty20Insight will have an early impact on our industrial partners, with whom we will work to advance the state-of-the-art in stakeholder engagement for the co-design of intelligent systems, and techniques for reasoning about uncertainty and making ML systems' decision-making more transparent.


Early career researchers. The project will provide the attached PDRAs with advanced training in research methods, publication and career development, which will eventually develop the PDRAs into independent researchers by the end of the project.

Research community. Twenty20Insight will develop fundamental new knowledge about engineering intelligent systems both within and at the boundaries between the design, RE/SE, AI and ML research communities.

Industries revolutionised by AI. AI/ML can be applied to nearly every industrial sector. Designing the increasingly complex AI systems requires stakeholders to understand both the Horizon of Possibilities and Envelope of Acceptability when applying ML to their problems. This project has a great potential to tackle such a problem and thus will significantly impact all the industries revolutionised by AI.

Software development companies. The new tools and techniques that will be developed in this project will have the potential to enhance software development companies to meet the increasing demand for intelligent systems operating in an uncertain world.

Wider society. The principal beneficiary of initiatives that aim to generate transformative ideas in order to advance technology, such as the Twenty20Insight project, is ultimately the wider society. This is particularly true of Twenty20Insight since one our explicit aims is to discover techniques to better understand systems' societal impact and enable stakeholders to handle such knowledge in a systematic and transparent way.