Subject: [dispatch] Open Ethics Transparency Protocol

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 18:13:15 +0200

Hi everyone,
Nikita Lukianets from the Open Ethics initiative here.

I've been working on the mechanisms to enable transparency for data 
collection and data processing practices for autonomous systems and 
specifically, those powered by machine learning models. Since 2020 I 
have started to draft a guiding document to reflect ways disclosures 
could be submitted, verified, and exchanged. Eventually, I would like to 
see how this work could result in an open standard.

I've chosen IETF as a home for this work as AI-powered applications are 
becoming ubiquitous. Therefore, we should start looking at them from the 
internet standard and supply chain perspectives.
There's an emergent need to bring a legally-agnostic and standardized 
way to describe these systems from privacy, security, fairness, 
datasets, and explainability stances.

The idea is simple
* Following the example of the food (construction, pharma, electrical 
appliance) industry, we need every application to (voluntary) disclose 
the "ingredients", e.g. how data is collected and outputs are produced.
* We need to have a standard way (protocol) to represent each disclosure 
in human- and machine-readable formats, validate, verify and process 
them.
* Complex apps will involve chaining the disclosures for the components 
involved.

My motivation is to continue the discussion here and get feedback 
allowing us to iterate on the protocol. I'd like to bring this 
discussion to a relevant group or/and welcome the creation of the new 
one, also potentially bringing the conversation to the IETF meeting in 
Vienna.

Below are the links with more info
Article to bring the context, in plain English
https://lukianets.medium.com/why-algorithmic-transparency-needs-a-protocol-2b6d5098572f

The IETF I-D
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lukianets-open-ethics-transparency-protocol/

GitHub repo
https://github.com/OpenEthicsAI/OETP

Thanks a lot for your help and thoughts

Nikita Lukianets
Founder, CTO PocketConfidant
Founder Open Ethics initiative
Twitter: @nikiluk
https://fr.linkedin.com/in/nikiluk
Schedule a 30 min call: https://lukianets.com/meet/

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 15:46:21 -0500

[email-masked] wrote:
    > could be submitted, verified, and exchanged. Eventually, I would like
    > to see how this work could result in an open standard.

Are you talking about security disclosures?
Or something else?
I read the connected links and I think it has something to do with disclosing
risks with Machine Learning systems.

    > becoming ubiquitous. Therefore, we should start looking at them from
    > the internet standard and supply chain perspectives.  There's an
    > emergent need to bring a legally-agnostic and standardized way to
    > describe these systems from privacy, security, fairness, datasets, and
    > explainability stances.

...

    > The idea is simple * Following the example of the food (construction,
    > pharma, electrical appliance) industry, we need every application to
    > (voluntary) disclose the "ingredients", e.g. how data is collected and
    > outputs are produced.  * We need to have a standard way (protocol) to

Sounds like a kind of (software) Bill of Materials.
SBOM is not really occuring inside the IETF, but rather at places like NIST.

We have some of it in the MUD (RFC8520) space, some in SACM (CoRIM), but
mostly it is at NIST/NTIA.   I don't think SBOM fits at all though.

    > Below are the links with more info Article to bring the context, in
    > plain English

I read this, but and while it explained some of the why, it didn't make it
clear what your how is.

    > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lukianets-open-ethics-transparency-protocol/

I scanned your document.  You have a pretty good grasp of a reasonable
syntax, and in some ways it is similiar to securitytxt in syntax.
But, I don't really understand the semantics of the content, and your example
in section 5 didn't help me at all.

I think you need a more detailed, more well worked set of examples to
motivate things.  Avoid getting into the syntax: how would practices be
described, attested to, etc?

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide

---

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 17:22:14 -0800

Check out 
               https://github.com/w3ctag/ethical-web-principles
which seems to have some momentum and some similar goals.
--
https://LarryMasinter.net https://interlisp.org