Toward learning trustworthily from data combining privacy, fairness, and explainability: An application to face recognition

In many decision-making scenarios, ranging from recreational activities to healthcare and policing, the use of artificial intelligence coupled with the ability to learn from historical data is becoming ubiquitous. This widespread adoption of automated systems is accompanied by the increasing concerns regarding their ethical implications. Fundamental rights, such as the ones that require the preservation of privacy, do not discriminate based on sensible attributes (e.g., gender, ethnicity, political/sexual orientation), or require one to provide an explanation for a decision, are daily undermined by the use of increasingly complex and less understandable yet more accurate learning algorithms. For this purpose, in this work, we work toward the development of systems able to ensure trustworthiness by delivering privacy, fairness, and explainability by design. In particular, we show that it is possible to simultaneously learn from data while preserving the privacy of the individuals thanks to the use of Homomorphic Encryption, ensuring fairness by learning a fair representation from the data, and ensuring explainable decisions with local and global explanations without compromising the accuracy of the final models. We test our approach on a widespread but still controversial application, namely face recognition, using the recent FairFace dataset to prove the validity of our approach.