Tutorial 4 June at IEEE ICRA 30 May–5 June 2021
Ethical
Considerations in Robotics and Automation
Jim Torresen
Department of Informatics / RITMO
University of Oslo
Norway
jimtoer@ifi.uio.no
Time: Friday 4 June,
10:00–12:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST) (GMT+2)
Zoom link for tutorial: https://uio.zoom.us/j/66716622115?pwd=b2dXdURVZEk4MXQ5OFdVbXZFOFlYQT09
Meeting ID: 667 1662 2115 Passcode: 320326
ABSTRACT – A brief description of the tutorial
Ethical
considerations are getting increased attention with regards to providing
responsible personalisation for robots and autonomous systems. 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 tutorial 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,
Human-Robot-Interaction
1
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.
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 are currently undertaking research in various projects where the
challenges appear, including in robots for
elderly at home, mental health
care technology and general vulnerability of robots in healthcare domains.
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.
The tutorial will be given through Zoom and contain a
mix of a prerecorded video, live polls, chat Q&A
and a live discussion in the end. some
parts where participants discuss and comment on ethical challenges in small
groups and in plenary. Further, opinions within the audience will be collected
through using the Kahoot! voting tool (responding using smartphones to answer multiple-choice
questions). If virtual, text Q & A, live Q & A and attendee polls will
be used.
Length/format: Half day, June
4 at 09:00 Central European Time
2 Characterization of the potential target audience
There is increasing
attention on the ethical implications of robotics and AI research and development.
Thus, the tutorial will be targeting all attendees of the
IEEE ICRA-2021 conference – across a broad range of technology and
applications. 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 robotics and automation research and
development. There is no specific prerequisite knowledge required.
3
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 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: http://jimtoer.no/
Information about previous tutorials delivered by the
presenters
See an overview of past
invited talks and tutorials here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This
work is partially supported by The Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number
262762 and as a part of Multimodal Elderly Care systems (MECS) project,
under grant agreement 247697, the INTROducing
Mental health through Adaptive Technology (INTROMAT)
project under grant agreement 259293 and Vulnerability in the Robot Society
(VIROS) under grant agreement 288285.
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