TY - JOUR
T1 - Building Trustworthiness into Intelligent Systems: From Data Provenance and Model Reliability to Human Control and Institutional Accountability
AU - James Whitfield
AU - Aisha Rahman
AU - Kenji Sato
JF - Journal of Trustworthy and Explainable Intelligent Systems
JO - J Trustworthy Explain Intell Syst
Y1 - 2025
VL - 4
IS - 2
SP - 76
N2 - Intelligent systems increasingly influence decisions, allocate attention, generate recommendations, and mediate interactions across technical, organizational, and social environments. Yet trustworthiness is often approached through isolated interventions, such as improving model accuracy, adding post-hoc explanations, documenting datasets, or assigning nominal human oversight. This article proposes a trustworthy-by-design conceptual framework that treats trustworthiness as a system-level property requiring coordinated design and evaluation across the full intelligent-system lifecycle. The framework begins with system-purpose and risk-context definition, followed by stakeholder and responsibility mapping, data-integrity assessment, provenance and lineage review, data documentation and governance, model-reliability evaluation, robustness and uncertainty assessment, and bias and fairness review where relevant. It then connects explanation quality with human interpretability and decision usefulness, rather than assuming that technically generated explanations will necessarily support understanding. Human oversight, meaningful control, contestability, recourse, institutional accountability, traceability, auditability, monitoring, and feedback updating form additional interdependent layers. The framework’s principal contribution is to clarify how technical evidence must be connected to human decision conditions and institutional responsibility without treating any individual safeguard as sufficient. Data provenance does not establish data appropriateness, robustness does not prove safety, explanations do not guarantee interpretability, human presence does not ensure meaningful control, and governance arrangements do not independently establish accountability. The framework may support conceptual analysis, assurance-oriented evaluation, and lifecycle governance planning, but requires empirical validation, human-centered assessment, domain-specific interpretation, and continuing institutional review.
UR - https://tipublications.com/m116674986
ER -