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thesis/chapters/1_introduction.tex

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 Artificial intelligence techniques have recently started enjoying widespread industry awareness and adoption; the use of AI is increasingly prevalent in all sectors \cite{wirtz2019artificial,bosch2021engineering}. The reasons behind this are manifold \cite{jordan2015machine}, to name a few: recent breakthroughs in deep learning (DL), increased public awareness, an abundance of available data, access to powerful low-cost commodity hardware, education, but most interestingly, the rise of high-level libraries making ready-to-use state-of-the-art (SOTA) models easily available. The latter practically abolishes the barrier of entry for applying AI --- and with that --- can help use cases in various areas. 
 
-However, the successful integration of AI components into production-ready applications demands strong engineering methods in order to achieve robust deployments \cite{serban2020adoption}. That is why it is as vital as ever to also focus on the quality and robustness of deployed models and software. For instance, the lack of a proper overview of data transformation steps may lead to suboptimal performance and to introducing unintended biases, which might contribute to the ever-increasing negative externality of misused AI \cite{o2016weapons}.
+However, in order to achieve robust deployments, the successful integration of AI components into production-ready applications demands strong engineering methods \cite{serban2020adoption}. That is why it is as vital as ever to also focus on the quality and robustness of deployed models and software. For instance, the lack of a proper overview of data transformation steps may lead to suboptimal performance and to introducing unintended biases, which might contribute to the ever-increasing negative externality of misused AI \cite{o2016weapons}.
 
-Concerningly, a peculiar tendency seems to be unfolding: even though industry professionals already have access to numerous frameworks for deploying AI correctly and responsibly, case studies and developer surveys have found that a considerable fraction of deployments does not follow best practices \cite{serban2020adoption,haakman2021ai,amershi2019software,de2019understanding,sculley2015hidden}. Utilising state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models has become reasonably simple; applying them correctly is as difficult and nuanced as ever. 
+Concerningly, a peculiar tendency seems to be unfolding: even though industry professionals already have access to numerous frameworks for deploying AI correctly and responsibly, case studies and developer surveys have found that a considerable fraction of deployments does not follow best practices \cite{serban2020adoption,haakman2021ai,amershi2019software,de2019understanding,sculley2015hidden}. Utilising state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models has become reasonably simple; applying them correctly is as intricate and nuanced as ever. 
 
 This thesis sets out to investigate the reasons behind the apparent asymmetry between industry adoption of accessible AI-libraries and existing reusable solutions for robust AI deployments. It is hypothesised that the primary reason for the underwhelming adoption rate of best practices is the short supply of professionals equally proficient in the domains of both data science and software engineering. Nevertheless, even without their presence, practitioners could rely on frameworks for automated mature deployment processes. However, the barrier of entry for using such existing libraries is too high, especially when compared with the simplicity of AI-libraries.
 
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ I hypothesise that facilitating the adoption of AI deployment best practices is
 
 In this case, complexity refers to the difficulty faced by professionals (Data Scientists and Software Engineers alike) when integrating third-party libraries with their solutions. This could also be described as the barrier of entry or steepness of the learning curve. If the aforementioned hypothesis is correct, the adoption of best practices can be efficiently increased by decreasing this complexity. AI deployment best practices entail the technical steps that ought to be taken to achieve robust, end-to-end, automated, and trustworthy deployments. These are detailed in Section \ref{section:requirements}.
 
-The existence question regarding the problem itself (\textbf{RQ1}) is answered by reviewing the literature of more than 30 published case studies in Chapter \ref{chapter:background}. \textbf{RQ2} and \textbf{RQ3} are closely connected, the design and evaluation phases utilised to answer them follow an iterative process. They are examined in Chapters \ref{chapter:design} and \ref{chapter:case} respectively. The final evaluation step is to ascertain the capability of the framework's design to generalise beyond a single subdomain and problem context. This question, \textbf{RQ4}, is investigated through interviews with industry professionals in Chapter \ref{section:interviews}.
+The existence question regarding the problem itself (\textbf{RQ1}) is answered by reviewing the literature of more than 30 published case studies in Chapter \ref{chapter:background}. \textbf{RQ2} and \textbf{RQ3} are closely connected: the design and evaluation phases utilised to answer them follow an iterative process. They are examined in Chapters \ref{chapter:design} and \ref{chapter:case} respectively. The final evaluation step is to ascertain the capability of the framework's design to generalise beyond a single subdomain and problem context. This question, \textbf{RQ4}, is investigated through interviews with industry professionals in Chapter \ref{chapter:interviews}.
 
 \section{Structure}