Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The application of machine learning (ML) to the complex problems of the aerospace industry, which has high standards of performance and security, needs to make the techniques robust, comprehensible, guaranteeing privacy and thus certifiable by the authorities. The DEEL project, as a result of an international collaboration between ITS Saint Exupéry in France, IVADO and CRIAQ in Canada, aims to take a first step towards the use of machine learning techniques for various problems of the Canadian aerospace industry through a multidisciplinary collaboration between several industry players and several Canadian universities with more than a dozen researchers and more than twenty graduate students and highly qualified professionals annually.The first theme deals with robustness and consists of developing ML methods that remain effective even in extreme situations not observed during design. To do this work, we rely on methods for measuring decision uncertainty, managing context changes, and methods that are robust to attack. The second theme deals with interpretability and involves developing methods that provide explanations to experts (designer, crew) to make the decisions or advice of the system understandable. The methods used in this theme are based on the notion of transparency of the learned model and on the notion of explicability of a given decision. The third theme deals with privacy by design and involves developing methods that ensure that the data used to design the ML model remains confidential and cannot be rebuilt from the results or operation of the system. The methods used in this theme are based on the controlled addition of noise in data and learning on encrypted data.These three themes aim to provide techniques to improve trust in the results of ML systems and to enable certifiability. The objective of this fourth theme is to develop ML certifiability techniques. We propose using methods and best practices of software engineering, such as tests and formal methods, to discover how to adapt them to ML.