Leading Researchers:

Dr Andrew Lensen
Harry Rodger
Dr Marcin Betkier

Faculty:

Faculty of Engineering (School of Engineering and Computer Science)

Faculty of Law

Publications:

Harry Rodger, Andrew Lensen & Marcin Betkier, ‘Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Assault Sentence Prediction in New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, vol. 53, no. 1, 2023, pp. 133-147.

Articles on:

The Conversation

The New Zealand Herald

Radio interviews:

The Panel (RNZ)

ABC Canberra

The importance of collaboration and seizing opportunities

Andrew, Marcin, and Harry’s article in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand came about through an interesting process that demonstrates the value not only of inter-disciplinary collaboration, but also the value that students can bring to our research projects.

Harry Rodger, one of the paper’s co-authors, was a third-year student undertaking a conjoint degree in Law and Computer Science. He wanted to take a Directed Individual Study course (SCIE306) as a ‘capstone project’ for his degree and had begun discussing a project idea with Marcin. He then approached Andrew as a potential supervisor. While a little wary of the extra workload that comes with supervising DIS courses, Andrew was swayed by Harry’s passion for the project as well as the interesting implications of applying machine learning transformers to assault sentence predictions.

After Harry completed the project, a call for papers for a special issue on AI applications came out from the Journal, Andrew reached out to Marcin and Harry about extending Harry’s work into a manuscript and publishing it. With a lot of re-running and re-design of the experiments, the team ended up re-positioning the paper a little to add a focus on ‘explainability’ – with the dual benefits of a more accurate model, combined with greater scope for Marcin and Harry to provide contextual legal analysis. This analysis, focussed on the weighting of words validated the model as a tool to understand how sentencing decisions are influenced.

The paper was accepted and published – but the team wanted to look at ways to broaden its impact and reach, given the important real-world implications of their findings. They were able to publish an easily digestible version in The Conversation, which picked up a lot of media attention including an article in the NZ Herald and interviews with Radio New Zealand and ABC Canberra. Thanks to the interest generated by the media exposure, the original article now ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

Andrew’s take-home message from the project is that researchers need to “be open to opportunities that are interesting and ‘unusual.’” Collaborating with Marcin and Harry has led opened a whole new area of research at the intersection of AI and Law with great potential for future research and impact.

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