Accountability in Computing: Concepts and Mechanisms

Accountability is a widely studied but amorphous concept, used to mean different things across different disciplines and domains of application. Here, we survey work on accountability in computer science and other disciplines. We motivate our survey with a study of the myriad ways in which the term “accountability” has been used across disciplines and the concepts that play key roles in defining it. This leads us to identify a temporal spectrum onto which we may place different notions of accountability to facilitate their comparison. We then survey accountability mechanisms for different application domains in computer science and place them on our spectrum. Building on this broader survey, we review frameworks and languages for studying accountability in computer science. Finally, we offer conclusions, open questions, and future directions.