Designing Accountable Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using Structural Causal Models to define, compare, and evaluate accountability in technical systems, aiding developers in designing accountable autonomous systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to model and analyze accountability in systems using Structural Causal Models, bridging conceptual definitions with practical evaluation.

Findings

Models can capture diverse accountability definitions

Method enables comparison of accountability frameworks

Application demonstrated on autonomous car case study

Abstract

Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the early history of Liberalism and is suggested as a tool to limit the use of power. This long history has also given us many, often slightly differing, definitions of accountability. The problem that software developers now face is to understand what accountability means for their systems and how to reflect it in a system's design. To enable the rigorous study of accountability in a system, we need models that are suitable for capturing such a varied concept. In this paper, we present a method to express and compare different definitions of accountability using Structural Causal Models. We show how these models can be used to evaluate a system's design and present a small use case based on an autonomous car.