A Semiotics-based epistemic tool to reason about ethical issues in digital technology design and development

Evaluating Approaches for Developers Ethical Reasoning and Communication About Machine Learning Models

“…Why? (d) *What ethical issues need to be handled through system redesign, redevelopment, policy, or even decommissioning Figure 3.2: Extended Metacommunication Template as proposed by Barbosa et al (2021) This difference is also reflected in which development stages are explicitly referred in the artifacts' sections. In the Model Card structure, most of the information concerns the final model and its data, and the data used to train and evaluate it.…”

“…The first one is the Model Cards (MC) representation, proposed by Mitchell et al (2019). The second one is the Extended Metacommunication Template (EMT), a semiotic engineering tool proposed in Barbosa et al (2021). One key design difference between these tools is that, while Model Cards are meant to bring transparency and provide information about the resulting model after being deployed/implemented, the Template should be used since the design phase of the system, to guide the development, implementation, and even follow up work on the system in use.…”

“…These principles were also used by Barbosa et al (2021) as an ethical framework to exemplify the use of the Extended Metacommunication Template. We offer here a brief explanation of each of the four principles.…”

“…Then, we more extensively go through the work of Mitchell et al (2019), which proposes the Model Card as a tool for reporting machine learning models, and Barbosa et al (2021), which proposes the Extended Metacommunication Template, building upon previous Semiotic Engineering research. These tools not only document intelligent systems, but have the specific goal of aiding the ethical reflection of machine learning algorithms, and were used in our study, further described in Chapter 4.…”

“…After summing up this proposal to increase algorithmic transparency, in the next section we describe the other proposal to be used in our larger study. Barbosa et al (2021) proposed the Extended Metacommunication Template, where they focus on the "1 st -person [...] assessment of ethical dimensions of one's work. This proposal resembles the Model Card as developers are also expected to ethically reflect about their work; however, it is differentiated since this is not expected to be shared with other stakeholders.…”