Congratulations to Greta Warren on her PhD “User-centred counterfactual explanations for explainable AI”! Greta’s PhD was co-supervised by Mark Keane and Ruth Byrne; its external examiner was Dr Tim Miller, Queensland, Australia. Greta’s PhD was formally conferred at a ceremony in University College Dublin in December 2024. Pictured at the ceremony are Greta (left) and Mark (centre), along with another of Mark’s PhD students, Courtney Ford (right).
Members of the lab gave several talks at the International Thinking Conference in Milan in June 2024. Xinyue Dai gave a talk at the conference titled “A controllability bias in causal explanation” co-authored with Mark Keane, Laurence Shalloo, Elodie Ruelle and Ruth Byrne.
With Kai Epstude from Groningen, Ruth Byrne co-organised a symposium at the conference on “Everyday applications of counterfactual thinking”. It included talks by Patrizia Catellani and Mauro Bertolotti on pre-bunking fake news; Kai Epstude, Daniel Effron, and Neal Roese on partisanship; Rachel Smallman and Sherecce Fields on health decisions; and Paul Henne on causation. Ruth gave a talk in the symposium on “Counterfactual explanations for human and AI risky decisions”, co-authored with Xinyue Dai, Laurence Shalloo, Elodie Ruelle, Mark Keane.
With Sunny Khemlani from Washington, Ruth also co-organised a symposium at the conference on “What are explanations for?”. It included talks by Jeff Zemla and Daniel Corral on mechanistic thinking; Laura Kelly and Sunny on temporal explanations; and Emily Liquin, Frederick Callaway and Tania Lombrozo on curiosity. Ruth gave a talk in the symposium on “Preferences for simple explanations in diagnosis and prediction” co-authored with Greta Warren and Mark Keane.
Sunny also gave a talk a the conference titled “Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic” co-authored with Phil Johnson-Laird and Ruth Byrne.
Ruth Byrne gave a keynote talk at the Causal Cognition in Humans and Machines meeting in Oxford, UK in January 2024.
Ruth Byrne gave a keynote talk at the 20th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2024.
Xinyue Dai presented a poster about her PhD experiments on whether AI recommendations affect risky choices at the annual conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology in Portugal in September 2023, see https://escop2023.org/
Ruth Byrne gave an invited talk at the workshop on “Counterfactuals in Minds and Machines” at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Hawaii, July 23rd – 29th 2023, details here. Her talk was on “How people reason with counterfactual explanations for decisions by Artificial Intelligence systems”, recordings here.
Eoin Delaney gave a talk and poster with Mark Keane at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Hawaii, July 23rd – 29th 2023, details here
The title of their work was “Counterfactual explanations for misclassified images”.
Ruth Byrne was a keynote speaker at the 31st International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR’23, in Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, July 17th – 20th 2023, details here.
Her talk was on “How people reason with counterfactual explanations for AI decisions”.
Ruth Byrne and Mark Keane both gave talks at the meeting in honour of Phil Johnson-Laird on the 40th anniversary of the publication of his 1983 Mental Models book, at UCL in London, 19th-20th July 2023. details here.
Mark’s talk, with Molly Quinn, was on “Thinking about the unexpected: is it familiar or unfamiliar?”
Ruth’s talk was on “Are counterfactual explanations similar to causal explanations”
A recording of Phil’s talk is here.
Lenart Celar’s thesis experiments have been published in Memory & Cognition this year:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-023-01407-5
Reasoning and Imagination Lab 