The Impact of Responsible AI Research on Innovation and Development


Description

Translational research, especially in the fast-evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is key to converting scientific findings into practical innovations. In Responsible AI (RAI) research, translational impact is often viewed through various pathways, including research papers, blogs, news articles, and the drafting of forthcoming AI legislation (e.g., the EU AI Act). However, the real-world impact of RAI research remains an underexplored area.

In this work, we aim capture RAI translational impact through two pathways: patents and code repositories, both of which provide a rich and structured source of data. Using a dataset of 200,000 papers from 1980 to 2022 in AI and related fields, including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction, we developed a Sentence-Transformers Deep Learning framework to identify RAI papers. This framework calculates the semantic similarity between paper abstracts and a set of RAI keywords, which are derived from the NIST's AI Risk Management Framework; a framework that aims to enhance trustworthiness considerations in the design, development, use, and evaluation of AI products, services, and systems.

Key Findings

  1. 1,747 RAI papers were published in top venues such as CHI, CSCW, NeurIPS, FAccT, and AIES between 2015 and 2022.
  2. A small subset of RAI papers that goes into patents or repositories is highly cited, with the translational process taking between 1 year for repositories and up to 8 years for patents.
  3. Impactful RAI research is not limited to top U.S. institutions, but significant contributions come from European and Asian institutions
  4. RAI papers tend to build on unconventional combinations of prior knowledge, highlighting the multidiscplinary nature of these papers that incorporate knowledge from diverse fields of expertise.

Publications

  • The Impact of Responsible AI Research on Innovation and Development. AIES 2024 PDF
  • Supplementary Information: The Impact of Responsible AI Research on Innovation and Development. AIES 2024 PDF

Code and data


We'll never share your email with anyone else.

N.B.: If you do not receive the instruction message within a few hours, please check your junk/spam e-mail folder just in case the email was moved there.