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Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Intelligent systems technologies are being utilised in more and more scenarios including autonomous vehicles, smart home appliances, public services, retail and manufacturing. But what happens when such systems fail, as in the case of recent high-profile accidents involving autonomous vehicles? How are such systems (and their developers) held to account if they are found to be making biased or unfair decisions? Can we interrogate intelligent systems, to ensure they are fit for purpose before they're deployed? These are all real and timely challenges, given that intelligent systems will increasingly affect many aspects of everyday life. While all new technologies have the capacity to do harm, with intelligent systems it may be difficult or even impossible to know what went wrong or who should be held responsible. There is a very real concern that the complexity of many AI technologies, the data and interactions between the surrounding systems and workflows, will reduce the justification for consequential decisions to "the algorithm made me do it", or indeed "we don't know what happened". And yet the potential for such systems to outperform humans in accuracy of decision-making, and even safety suggests that the desire to use them will be difficult to resist. The question then is how we might endeavour to have the best of both worlds. How can we benefit from the superhuman capacity and efficiency that such systems offer without giving up our desire for accountability, transparency and responsibility? How can we avoid a stalemate choice between forgoing the benefits of automated systems altogether or accepting a degree of arbitrariness that would be unthinkable in society's usual human relationships? Working closely with a range of stakeholders, including members of the public, the legal profession and technology companies, we will explore what it means to realise future intelligent systems that are transparent and accountable. The Accountability Fabric is our vision of a future computational infrastructure supporting audit of such systems - somewhat analogous to (but more sophisticated than) the 'blackbox' flight recorders associated with passenger aircraft. Our work will increase transparency not only after the fact, but also in a manner which allows for early interrogation and audit which in turn may help to prevent or to mitigate harm ex ante. Before we can realise the Accountability Fabric, several key issues need to be investigated: What are the important factors that influence citizen's perceptions of trust and accountability of intelligent systems? What form ought legal liability take for intelligent systems? How can the law operate fairly and incentivize optimal behaviour from those developing/using such systems? How do we formulate an appropriate vocabulary with which to describe and characterise intelligent systems, their context, behaviours and biases? What are the technical means for recording the behaviour of intelligent systems, from the data used, the algorithms deployed, and the flow-on effects of the decisions being made? Can we realise an accountability solution for intelligent systems, operating across a range of technologies and organisational boundaries, that is able to support third party audit and assessment? Answers to these (and the many other questions that will certainly emerge) will lead us to develop prototype solutions that will be evaluated with project partners. Our ambition is to create a means by which the developer of an intelligent system can provide a secure, tamper-proof record of the system's characteristics and behaviours that can be shared (under controlled circumstances) with relevant authorities in the event of an incident or complaint.

In recent years the concept of driverless or autonomous road vehicles (AVs) has gained a great deal of technical respectability and most major manufacturers intend to bring a partially or fully autonomous vehicle to market within the next few years. Much progress has been made on a range of technologies relevant to this concept, including digital mapping, position recognition by lidar and radar systems and advanced vehicle to vehicle communications. There are a number of advantages for such vehicles over normal driver controlled vehicles in terms of safety, reliability, access for the disabled and increasing the efficiency of road use. The latter comes about primarily because such vehicles are able to drive closely together in platoon formation. This project is concerned with a technical area associated with platoon running. where to date only a restricted amount of experimental work has been carried out - that of the aerodynamics of vehicles travelling in platoons, and the nature of the flow field in and around platoons is not well understood. In particular the following aspects will be investigated. a) The overall stability of vehicles travelling in the wake of other vehicles, particularly if there are organised coherent wake flow structures such as trailing vortices. These stability effects may be made more severe by the presence of slight cross winds that result in asymmetric and variable wakes, which can be expected to occur for the majority of the time. b) Problems associated with exhaust pollutants can also be envisaged, as it is possible that pollutants may build up along the length of the platoon and not be released into the open atmosphere, and may, if the conditions are suitable, be ingested by vehicle power plant and ventilation systems. c) Aerodynamic noise is an important design consideration for road vehicles, both in terms of passenger and driver comfort, and in terms of the overall effect of traffic on the surrounding environment. It is not clear how the use of platoon running of AVs will affect the internal and external propagation of aerodynamic vehicle noise. In addition work is proposed to investigate a related problem - the aerodynamic aspects of trains running very closely together, an issue which has emerged from recent studies of high speed coupling and uncoupling operations. This work will be carried out through physical and computational modelling. The physical modelling work will utilise the University of Birmingham moving model TRAIN Rig, which allows individual and platoons of vehicles to be propelled along a 150m long test track at speeds of up to 80m/s. The work will involve detailed measurements of pressure over the vehicles (such that aerodynamic forces can be calculated), and measurements of aerodynamic noise propagation from platoons and pollutant dispersion from platoons. The computational work will be carried out using conventional RANS techniques for a wide range of vehicle and platoon configurations, but also a smaller number of calculations using more sophisticated DES and LED methods to provide high quality unsteady flow information. Taken together, the physical modelling results and the CFD will enable a detailed understanding to be achieved of the aerodynamic behaviour of ground vehicles running closely together, which will be of considerable interest and importance to a variety of stakeholders.