Ethical Challenges and Opportunities within Computational Intelligence System Development

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 talk 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. We are currently undertaking research in various projects where the challenges appear. 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 with special attention to problems relevant when working with research and development within computational intelligence. Ethical issues should not be seen only as challenges but also as new research opportunities contributing to more useful services and systems.

Earlier experience from talks on the same topic has shown that there is in general, a wide interest in the theme of the tutorial. There is increasing attention on the ethical implications of computational intelligence research. Thus, the tutorial will be targeting all attendees of SSCI 2020.

Outline

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 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).

Expected length of the tutorial: 2h

The level of the tutorial: Introductory

Biography of Presenter

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, 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: link 1 and Link 2