This past October, the Howso team celebrated it’s open source launch at the All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Team members near and far gathered to spread the word about Howso Engine, the world’s first open source Understandable AI® engine. Rather than facilitating a traditional conference booth, the Howso team set-up an “open concept” demo lab where attendees could check out the open source project on Github, interact with the Howso playground, and hear about our work to “Open the box.”

What exactly does “Open the box” mean? Humanity is making critical decisions with black box AI which is prone to hallucinations, bias, and opacity. Black box models were never designed to be understandable, auditable, or trusted. It is time to “open the box”, or to build open source, high-powered, trustworthy AI so we can make human critical decisions with transparent tools.

With Howso, that’s possible. We’re an alternative to black box. Our open source Engine was designed to be natively explainable, transparent and trusted. We ensure that every prediction provides exact attribution back to the input data. The result? Completely auditable and trustworthy AI for predictions that matter like mortgage approvals, parole hearings, or employment decisions.

At the conference, ATO attendees were incredibly excited to hear about Howso’s work. Folks came up to the interactive booth and shared both their hopes and their fears about how AI might change our society. They had the chance to get their hands on both the open source project on Github as well as walk through scenarios in the Howso Playground, a tool that shows people with little to no data science background how Engine works.

In addition to the interactions at the demo lab, attendees had a chance to engage with Howso co-founder and CTO Chris Hazard. Chris delivered two talks at ATO: 1. “Most ‘Open Source’ AI Isn’t. And What We Can Do About That.” 2. “Are Privacy and Intellectual Property Still Relevant? Perspectives From History, Biology, Math, and, of Course, AI.” The ATO conference team recorded and published the second talk on privacy and IP, which you can find below.

The team closed out the 3-day conference energized to continue to advance the Howso mission of making trustworthy AI the global standard. We look forward to seeing some of the friends we made at ATO at conferences down the line.

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