Among the most important challenges are those related to privacy, fairness, transparency, safety and security. Countermeasures can be taken first at design time, second, when a user should decide where and when to apply a system and third, when a system is in use in its environment. In the latter case, there will be a need for the system by itself to perform some ethical reasoning if operating in an autonomous mode. This tutorial will introduce some examples from our own and others´ work and how the challenges can be addressed both from a technical and human side with special attention to problems relevant when working with AI research and development. AI ethical issues should not be seen only as challenges but also as new research opportunities contributing to more sustainable, socially beneficial services and systems.
An overview of the topic explaining its relevance and significance to the computational intelligence society
Computational intelligence ethics is a very broad and multi-disciplinary research area. In this tutorial, we would target to present a structured overview with a focus on the most important ethical issues and their countermeasures. It will also cover how that can open up new directions in research related to robots and systems.
As development is moving from lab settings to practical applications involving users, there is increasing attention on the ethical implications and legal issues related to robots and systems. Thus, earlier experience from talks on the same topic has shown that there is in general, a wide and increasing interest in the theme of the tutorial. Thus, the tutorial will target all attendees of the SSCI-2022 conference.
A tutorial schedule with topic and time allocation
The main content of the tutorial will be a presentation of the most commonly expressed ethical challenges. This will be illustrated by examples from own and others´ work. The tutorial will also contain some parts where participants discuss ethical challenges (plenary or in small groups). Further, opinions within the audience will be collected by using tools like the Mentimeter tool (responding using your smartphone to answer multiple-choice questions).
Schedule
- Introduction and motivation
- Ethical challenges and considerations
- How to address ethical challenges
- Future work and opportunities in ethics related-research
A short biography of each presenter
Professor Jim Torresen, University of Oslo, Norway
Jim Torresen is a professor at the University of Oslo where he leads the Robotics and Intelligent Systems research group. He received his M.Sc. and Dr.ing. (Ph.D) degrees in computer architecture and design from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, University of Trondheim in 1991 and 1996, respectively. He has been employed as a senior hardware designer at NERA Telecommunications (1996-1998) and at Navia Aviation (1998-1999). Since 1999, he has been a professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo (associate professor 1999-2005). Jim Torresen has been a visiting researcher at Kyoto University, Japan for one year (1993-1994), four months at Electrotechnical laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan (1997 and 2000) and a visiting professor at Cornell University, USA for one year (2010-2011).
His research interests at the moment include artificial intelligence, ethical aspects of AI and robotics, machine learning, robotics, and applying this to complex real-world applications. Several novel methods have been proposed. He has published over 200 scientific papers in international journals, books and conference proceedings. 10 tutorials and a number of invited talks have been given at international conferences and research institutes. He is in the program committee of more than ten different international conferences, associate editor of three international scientific journals as well as a regular reviewer of a number of other international journals. He has also acted as an evaluator for proposals in EU FP7 and Horizon2020 and is currently project manager/principal investigator in four externally funded research projects/centres. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (NTVA) and the National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (NENT) where he is a member of a working group on research ethics for AI.
More information and a list of publications can be found here:
https://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/people/aca/jimtoer/index.html http://www.ifi.uio.no/~jimtoer
Professor Xin Yao, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China and part-time at Univ. of Birmingham, UK
Xin Yao is a Chair Professor of Computer Science at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China (since fall 2016), and a part-time Professor of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK.
He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Distinguished Lecturer, and a Past (2014-15) President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Nature Inspired Computation and Applications Laboratory (NICAL), USTC-Birmingham Joint Research Institute in Intelligent Computation and Its Applications, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
His research interests include evolutionary computation (evolutionary optimization, evolutionary learning, evolutionary design), neural network ensembles and multiple classifiers (especially on the diversity issue), meta-heuristic algorithms, data mining, computational complexity of evolutionary algorithms, and various real-world applications. He received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2012, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2013. He was selected to receive the 2020 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award.
More information and publications:
https://faculty.sustech.edu.cn/xiny/en/ and https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~xin/
Google scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=UUtYPl4AAAAJ&hl=en