CS2125 Paper Review Form - Winter 2019

Reviewer: Yilin Han	

Paper Title:Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars

Author(s):Jack Stilgoe

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [X] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [ ] Good 
 [X] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [ ] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [X] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [X] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [ ] Generally well written
 [X] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [X] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

The paper summarized and demonstrated the comments from different people and organizations about the Tesla car accident in 2016. It is a non-technical report that focuses on the intersection of machine learning and social learning by analyzing these debates about the autonomous car's problems, and probably solutions. One problem about governance self-driving car/technologies is it is hard to evaluate the quality of machine learning products. This is due to machine learning model is not explainable. It is also very difficult to force the ethics of certain rules in machine learning. It further analyzes the reactions that people from the media, AVs maker, hardware makers, and other sociology professionals. The one solution the author showed and discussed in the paper is the data should be shared, where is learned from airline systems. Furthermore, the author proposed we could also leverage the social learning approach to governing the self-driving cars. 

I will recommend this paper to machine learning engineers to draw their attention to safety in their model design. I think ordinary people or people interested in technologies could also read this paper as a popular science article.  



8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1: This paper emphasized on the social concerns about the self-driving car, and also showed the possible solutions about governing self-driving car. Potentially it covers other innovative technologies. 
S2: It conducted a good discussion about autonomous vehicles. and showed us the voice from different groups in society.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1: the paper is hard to follow as it looks like an article or piece of news rather than a paper. The information may be hard to follow with people don't have enough social science background.