Tutorials
AAMAS 2022 – May 9-10
Ethical Challenges for Autonomous Agents and
Multiagent Systems
Jim Torresen
Department of Informatics
University of Oslo
Norway
jimtoer@ifi.uio.no
Zoom link to the tutorial:
https://uio.zoom.us/j/66716622115?pwd=b2dXdURVZEk4MXQ5OFdVbXZFOFlYQT09
The link should be enough, but I add
additional info just in case you should have problems with the link:
Meeting ID:
667 1662 2115
Passcode: 320326
ABSTRACT – A brief
description of the tutorial
Explainability, trust and
ethics for autonomous systems are getting increased attention. This is partly
as a result of the currently limited deployment of such systems in human
support and interaction settings. The tutorial will give an overview of the
most commonly expressed ethical challenges and
ways being undertaken to reduce their impact using the findings in an earlier undertaken
review supplemented with recent work and initiatives. The includes the identified challenges in a “Statement on
research ethics in artificial intelligence”. The
presentation will exemplify the challenges related to privacy, security and
safety through several examples from own and others’ work.
KEYWORDS
Ethics, Robotics, Autonomous systems, Privacy, Security and Safety
Outline of the tutorial
structure
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 potentially also contain some parts
where participants discuss ethical challenges in small groups. Further,
opinions within the audience will be collected through using the Kahoot! voting
tool (responding using your smartphone to answer multiple-choice quizzes).
Outline:
1. Introduction
and motivation
2. Ethical
challenges and considerations
3. How to
address ethical considerations in research including examples
4. Ethical
considerations in own research at Univ of Oslo
5. Future
opportunities in ethics-related research
Learning objectives of the tutorial:
· Getting an overview of the most commonly expressed ethical considerations with regards
to adaptive systems and robots.
· Get insight into how ethics is
relevant within the research and development of autonomous systems.
A detailed outline of the tutorial
Robots and artificial
intelligence demonstrate to effectively contribute to an increasing number of
different domains. At the same time, an increasing number of people – in the
general public as well as in research – have started to consider a number of
potential ethical challenges related to the development and use of such
technology. There are also initiatives across countries like the European
Commission appointed High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) that has as a general objective to support the
implementation of the European Strategy on Artificial Intelligence. This tutorial will give an
overview of the most commonly expressed ethical challenges and ways being undertaken to reduce
their impact using the findings in an earlier undertaken review supplemented with recent work and
initiatives. This includes the identified challenges in a “Statement on research ethics in
artificial intelligence”.
Among the most
important challenges are those related to privacy, 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 autonomous mode.
Specific attention will be needed if multiple, fully autonomous systems are to
interact and make decisions together. We have recently been undertaking research in
various projects where the challenges appear, including in robots for elderly at home and mental
health care technology. We are also involved in an interdisciplinary
project studying legal issues related to robots and intelligent systems through
the “Vulnerability in the Robot Society (VIROS)” research project. The 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 [1]-[5]. Ethical issues should not be seen only as challenges
but also as new research opportunities contributing to more useful services and
systems.
One example of the latter is to study a robot to be located in the home of
an older person living without a partner. That is with the goal of developing
multi-sensor mobile robot solutions that can sense, learn and notify caregiver
about abnormal events. We have focussed on three crucial aspects of such a
robot by addressing the sensing system, the motion control system and
considering the design and behaviour of a robot from a user perspective. We see
that key challenges for such a robot relate to privacy, security and safety.
The technological choices being made with regards to hardware and software both
make an impact on how well the challenges are handled. The privacy needs to be
compromised between limiting sensor data collection and the ability of a system
to correctly notify the caregiver when some abnormal and emergency situation
has happened. At the same time, light conditions in a home can vary a lot with
sunlight at daytime and darkness at night-time. This puts certain restrictions
on what sensors that are most effective and that multiple different sensors may
be needed. However, rather than transmitting a lot of personal sensor data to a
caregiver facility, the local robot should train a model to represent the
regular activities of the person it supports. Then only in the case of abnormal
events, the robot would transmit data out of the home. E.g., if the person does
some daily exercises, a sudden increase in heart rate would be expected while
it is no so for a person not usually doing any physical activity. Only in the
latter case, sensor data should be forwarded out of the home but only data that
is regarded as essential for the follow-up.
Length/format: Half
day
Target
audience
There is increasing attention on the ethical implications of
robotics and AI research. Thus, the tutorial will be targeting all
attendees of the AAMAS-2022 conference. The tutorial will give the
audience insight into the main ethical implication currently being discussed and also how that can open up for new directions in
autonomous agents and multiagent systems research. There is no specific prerequisite knowledge required.
A
brief resume of the presenter
Name: Jim Torresen
Postal address:
PO Box 1080 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
Phone numbers: +4722852454 (office) +4792846669 (mobile)
E-mail address: jimtoer@ifi.uio.no
Background in
the tutorial area
Jim Torresen is a professor at 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, Univ. of Trondheim in
1991 and 1996, respectively. He has been employed as a senior hardware designer
at NERA Telecom-munications (1996-1998) and at Navia Aviation (1998-1999). Since 1999, he has been a
professor at the Department of Informatics at the Univ. 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 (now AIST), 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 250 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: http://jimtoer.no/
Information
about previous tutorials delivered by the presenters (if any)
See an overview of past invited talks and tutorials here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is partially supported by
The Research Council of Norway as a part of the INTROducing
Mental health through Adaptive Technology (INTROMAT)
project under grant agreement 259293, Collaboration on Intelligent
Machines (COINMAC) project, under grant agreement 309869, Vulnerability in the Robot Society
(VIROS) under grant agreement 288285, Predictive and Intuitive
Robot Companion (PIRC) under grant agreement 312333 and through its Centres of
Excellence scheme, RITMO with project No. 262762.
REFERENCES
[1] Ryo Saegusa,
Hirokazu Ito, Duc Minh Duong, “Human-Care Rounds
Robot with Contactless Breathing Measurement", in proc. of 2019
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada,
May 20-24, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794037
[2] Bringsjord,
Selmer & Tokhi, M.O. & Isabel, Maria & Aldinhas Ferreira, Maria Isabel & Govindarajulu,
Naveen. (2019). Hybrid Worlds: Societal and Ethical Challenges, CLAWAR Association Series on Robot Ethics and Standards, http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/HybridWorlds.pdf
[3] Torresen,
J., “A Review of Future and Ethical Perspectives of Robotics and AI.” Frontiers
in Robotics and AI, vol. 4, article 75, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2017.00075
[4] Winfield, A. F., Blum, C., and
Liu, W. (2014). “Towards an ethical robot: internal models, consequences and
ethical action selection,” in Advances in Autonomous Robotics Systems,
eds M. Mistry, A. Leonardis, M. Witkowski, and C. Melhuish, 2014 Springer, pp. 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10401-0_8
[5] Winfield, A. F., Michael, K.,
Pitt J. and Evers V., "Machine Ethics: The Design and Governance of
Ethical AI and Autonomous Systems [Scanning the Issue]," in Proceedings
of the IEEE, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 509-517, March 2019. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8662743
Conference Name:ACM Woodstock
conference