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Mona Sloane

Publications and source records attributed to Mona Sloane.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Context and Symmetry in Auditing: A Case Study of Skeleton Inference in Motion Capture

Humans are increasingly expected to interact with AI systems that observe and make inferences about them - but do these systems actually work? A standard approach to answering this question is AI auditing. Conducting an AI audit requires identifying how a system behaves (i.e., determining what types of inputs to audit it with and then observing and documenting actual system behavior) and contrasting that with how a system should behave (i.e., determining what the nominal outputs of a system should look like). We argue that this is best done through a contextual audit, which we introduce as a method for auditing measurements within the context of the practices that produce them. We show how contextual auditing enables the interrogation of assumptions implicit in the audit process and allows auditors to be explicit about what serves as ground truth, which we define as verifiable measurements about the real world against which systems are evaluated. We outline how the concept of symmetry from science and technology studies can enable audits when ground truth is unknown, unknowable, or contested. Finally, to demonstrate how contextual and symmetric audits can be conducted in practice, we present a case study of skeleton inference in motion capture and propose areas suggested by our case study as particularly fruitful for future audits of motion capture systems.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

Context Collapse: Barriers to Adoption for Generative AI in Workplace Settings

As generative AI technologies are pressed into service in workplace settings, current approaches to account for the contexts in which such technologies are used fall short of users' expectations and needs. This paper empirically demonstrates, through expert interviews, both how these tools fail to account for users' context and how users deploy concrete strategies address such failures. The paper analyzes how context is variously conceptualized by tool developers, users, and social scientists to identify specific pitfalls inherent in computational approaches to context. Multiple distinct contexts tend to collapse into one another or rot, degrading over time, reducing the utility of any efforts to account for context. The paper concludes with a provocation to shift from an indiscriminate collection of context-relevant data toward a more interactional set of practices to embed GenAI systems more appropriately into users' contexts of use.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

Human Resource Management and AI: A Contextual Transparency Database

AI tools are proliferating in human resources management (HRM) and recruiting, helping to mediate access to the labor market. As these systems spread, profession-specific transparency needs emerging from black-boxed systems in HRM move into focus. Prior work often frames transparency technically or abstractly, but we contend AI transparency is a social project shaped by materials, meanings, and competencies of practice. This paper introduces the Talent Acquisition and Recruiting AI (TARAI) Index, situating AI systems within the social practice of recruiting by examining product functionality, claims, assumptions, and AI clarity. Built through an iterative, mixed-methods process, the database demonstrates how transparency emerges: not as a fixed property, but as a dynamic outcome shaped by professional practices, interactions, and competencies. By centering social practice, our work offers a grounded, actionable approach to understanding and articulating AI transparency in HR and provides a blueprint for participatory database design for contextual transparency in professional practice.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

Datasheets for Machine Learning Sensors

Machine learning (ML) is becoming prevalent in embedded AI sensing systems. These "ML sensors" enable context-sensitive, real-time data collection and decision-making across diverse applications ranging from anomaly detection in industrial settings to wildlife tracking for conservation efforts. As such, there is a need to provide transparency in the operation of such ML-enabled sensing systems through comprehensive documentation. This is needed to enable their reproducibility, to address new compliance and auditing regimes mandated in regulation and industry-specific policy, and to verify and validate the responsible nature of their operation. To address this gap, we introduce the datasheet for ML sensors framework. We provide a comprehensive template, collaboratively developed in academia-industry partnerships, that captures the distinct attributes of ML sensors, including hardware specifications, ML model and dataset characteristics, end-to-end performance metrics, and environmental impacts. Our framework addresses the continuous streaming nature of sensor data, real-time processing requirements, and embeds benchmarking methodologies that reflect real-world deployment conditions, ensuring practical viability. Aligned with the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability), our approach enhances the transparency and reusability of ML sensor documentation across academic, industrial, and regulatory domains. To show the application of our approach, we present two datasheets: the first for an open-source ML sensor designed in-house and the second for a commercial ML sensor developed by industry collaborators, both performing computer vision-based person detection.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Addressing Pitfalls in Auditing Practices of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies: A Case Study of People with Aphasia

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems' growing use warrants robust auditing approaches to ensure equitable transcription quality, especially for people with speech disorders like aphasia who disproportionately depend on ASR. While academic and industry audits have revealed performance disparities across user populations, standard auditing practices often overlook nuances that risk masking harm to marginalized groups. We identify three common pitfalls in standard ASR audits: (1) adhering to one method of text standardization, which can mask variance in ASR performance and ignore the standardization preferences of marginalized communities; (2) displaying high-level demographic findings without considering performance disparities by nuanced intersectional subgroups, or conditioning on relevant acoustic properties; and (3) reporting only one gold-standard metric (Word Error Rate), which inadequately quantifies common generative AI errors like hallucinations. We propose a holistic auditing framework addressing these pitfalls, and in a case study of six popular ASR systems, find consistently worse ASR performance for speakers with aphasia relative to a control group. We call on practitioners to implement these robust, community-driven ASR auditing practices better suited for the rapidly changing ASR landscape.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

Materiality and Risk in the Age of Pervasive AI Sensors

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems connected to sensor-laden devices are becoming pervasive, which has notable implications for a range of AI risks, including to privacy, the environment, autonomy and more. There is therefore a growing need for increased accountability around the responsible development and deployment of these technologies. Here we highlight the dimensions of risk associated with AI systems that arise from the material affordances of sensors and their underlying calculative models. We propose a sensor-sensitive framework for diagnosing these risks, complementing existing approaches such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework and the European Union AI Act, and discuss its implementation. We conclude by advocating for increased attention to the materiality of algorithmic systems, and of on-device AI sensors in particular, and highlight the need for development of a sensor design paradigm that empowers users and communities and leads to a future of increased fairness, accountability and transparency.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2024

Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms

Speech-to-text services aim to transcribe input audio as accurately as possible. They increasingly play a role in everyday life, for example in personal voice assistants or in customer-company interactions. We evaluate Open AI's Whisper, a state-of-the-art automated speech recognition service outperforming industry competitors, as of 2023. While many of Whisper's transcriptions were highly accurate, we find that roughly 1\% of audio transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio. We thematically analyze the Whisper-hallucinated content, finding that 38\% of hallucinations include explicit harms such as perpetuating violence, making up inaccurate associations, or implying false authority. We then study why hallucinations occur by observing the disparities in hallucination rates between speakers with aphasia (who have a lowered ability to express themselves using speech and voice) and a control group. We find that hallucinations disproportionately occur for individuals who speak with longer shares of non-vocal durations -- a common symptom of aphasia. We call on industry practitioners to ameliorate these language-model-based hallucinations in Whisper, and to raise awareness of potential biases amplified by hallucinations in downstream applications of speech-to-text models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2024

The Cadaver in the Machine: The Social Practices of Measurement and Validation in Motion Capture Technology

Motion capture systems, used across various domains, make body representations concrete through technical processes. We argue that the measurement of bodies and the validation of measurements for motion capture systems can be understood as social practices. By analyzing the findings of a systematic literature review (N=278) through the lens of social practice theory, we show how these practices, and their varying attention to errors, become ingrained in motion capture design and innovation over time. Moreover, we show how contemporary motion capture systems perpetuate assumptions about human bodies and their movements. We suggest that social practices of measurement and validation are ubiquitous in the development of data- and sensor-driven systems more broadly, and provide this work as a basis for investigating hidden design assumptions and their potential negative consequences in human-computer interaction.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2022

German AI Start-Ups and AI Ethics: Using A Social Practice Lens for Assessing and Implementing Socio-Technical Innovation

Within the current AI ethics discourse, there is a gap in empirical research on understanding how AI practitioners understand ethics and socially organize to operationalize ethical concerns, particularly in the context of AI start-ups. This gap intensifies the risk of a disconnect between scholarly research, innovation, and application. This risk materializes acutely as mounting pressures to identify and mitigate the potential harms of AI systems have created an urgent need to assess and implement socio-technical innovation for fairness, accountability, and transparency. Building on social practice theory, we address this need via a framework that allows AI researchers, practitioners, and regulators to systematically analyze existing cultural understandings, histories, and social practices of ethical AI to define appropriate strategies for effectively implementing socio-technical innovations. Our contributions are threefold: 1) we introduce a practice-based approach for understanding ethical AI; 2) we present empirical findings from our study on the operationalization of ethics in German AI start-ups to underline that AI ethics and social practices must be understood in their specific cultural and historical contexts; and 3) based on our empirical findings, we suggest that ethical AI practices can be broken down into principles, needs, narratives, materializations, and cultural genealogies to form a useful backdrop for considering socio-technical innovations.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2022

An External Stability Audit Framework to Test the Validity of Personality Prediction in AI Hiring

Automated hiring systems are among the fastest-developing of all high-stakes AI systems. Among these are algorithmic personality tests that use insights from psychometric testing, and promise to surface personality traits indicative of future success based on job seekers' resumes or social media profiles. We interrogate the validity of such systems using stability of the outputs they produce, noting that reliability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for validity. Our approach is to (a) develop a methodology for an external audit of stability of predictions made by algorithmic personality tests, and (b) instantiate this methodology in an audit of two systems, Humantic AI and Crystal. Crucially, rather than challenging or affirming the assumptions made in psychometric testing -- that personality is a meaningful and measurable construct, and that personality traits are indicative of future success on the job -- we frame our methodology around testing the underlying assumptions made by the vendors of the algorithmic personality tests themselves. Our main contribution is the development of a socio-technical framework for auditing the stability of algorithmic systems. This contribution is supplemented with an open-source software library that implements the technical components of the audit, and can be used to conduct similar stability audits of algorithmic systems. We instantiate our framework with the audit of two real-world personality prediction systems, namely Humantic AI and Crystal. The application of our audit framework demonstrates that both these systems show substantial instability with respect to key facets of measurement, and hence cannot be considered valid testing instruments.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2020

Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning

This paper critically examines existing modes of participation in design practice and machine learning. Cautioning against 'participation-washing', it suggests that the ML community must become attuned to possibly exploitative and extractive forms of community involvement and shift away from the prerogatives of context-independent scalability.

cs.CY↗