Il seminario si articolerà nei due interventi:

• “Be real, be social”, tenuto dal Prof. Frank Dignum dell’ Università di Utrecht
• “Ethics by Design: necessity or curse”, tenuto dalla Prof. Virginia Dignum del Delft Institute Design for Values, TU Delfte
  

Di seguito gli abstract dei due interventi e un breve CV degli studiosi, ospiti rispettivamente degli Istituti ITD e ICAR nell’ambito del programma Short Term Mobility.

Be real, be social.

In order to model autonomous systems that have to perform in a human environment as partner rather than as tools we have to take the social context serious.
This amounts to more than just adding a social behaviour module to existing architectures. It requires a different approach to modeling the deliberation of these systems. The social context shapes most of the decision making and should be part of the basic structure of these systems.
In the presentation I will talk about social practices, norms, values and motives as some of the prime factors of social behavior. I will sketch some first steps on how these factors can be modeled and their role in the deliberation cycle. Applications of this work are shown in social simulation, dialogue management in serious games and social robotics.

Ethics by Design: necessity or curse?

As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to integrate moral, societal and legal values with technological developments in AI, both during the design process as well as part of the deliberation algorithms employed by these systems.
In this talk, we look at leading ethics theories and propose alternative ways to ensure ethical behavior by artificial systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems.

Short Bio: Frank Dignum –  Utrecht University
Dr. Frank Dignum is working on social aspects of software agents with applications in serious gaming, social simulations and robotics. He is well known for his work on norms and other social structures. His latest research focuses on creating new agent architectures to build agents and robots that operate in real-time environments and have to cooperate with humans and other agents. He has organized many workshops and conferences on the topics and given tutorials at most major conferences and summer schools on them. At the moment his H-index is 50.

Short Bio: Virginia Dignum – Delft Institute Design for Values, TU Delft
Virginia Dignum is Associate Professor on Social Artificial Intelligence at TU Delft. Her research focuses on value-sensitive design of intelligent systems, in particular on the formalisation of ethical and normative behaviours and social interactions. She is Executive Director of the Delft Design for Values Institute,  Executive Committee member of IEEE Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous Systems and Director the AI and Robotics MSc program at TU Delft.