AJung Moon

Kathryn Henne

Negar Rostamzadeh

Paul Nicholas

N'Mah Yilla-Akbari

Jess Gallegos

Andrew J Smart

Emilio Garcia

Gurleen Virk

2023-08-28

Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (published)

arxiv.org

What does it mean to be a responsible AI practitioner: An ontology of roles and skills

With the growing need to regulate AI systems across a wide variety of application domains, a new set of occupations has emerged in the indus… (see more)try. The so-called responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) practitioners or AI ethicists are generally tasked with interpreting and operationalizing best practices for ethical and safe design of AI systems. Due to the nascent nature of these roles, however, it is unclear to future employers and aspiring AI ethicists what specific function these roles serve and what skills are necessary to serve the functions. Without clarity on these, we cannot train future AI ethicists with meaningful learning objectives. In this work, we examine what responsible AI practitioners do in the industry and what skills they employ on the job. We propose an ontology of existing roles alongside skills and competencies that serve each role. We created this ontology by examining the job postings for such roles over a two-year period (2020-2022) and conducting expert interviews with fourteen individuals who currently hold such a role in the industry. Our ontology contributes to business leaders looking to build responsible AI teams and provides educators with a set of competencies that an AI ethics curriculum can prioritize.

2023-08-28

Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (published)

arxiv.org

The potential for co-operatives to mitigate AI ethics catastrophes: perspectives from media analysis

David Marino

Would the world have seen less AI-related scandals if more AI companies operated as co-operatives? As a response to multiple high profile te… (see more)ch scandals within the last decade, there has been an increased call for introducing more accountability in the AI industry. However, it is unclear to what degree the proposed efforts have been or will be effective in practice. The question remains whether these incremental, multi-stakeholder AI ethics efforts are in fact trying to address a fundamentally systemic issue inherent to the existing corporate power structure. As an attempt to address this question, we gain an understanding of the major themes in high profile AI-related catastrophes in the last four years (2018–2021) through an inductive media analysis. We then investigate how the principle of democratic gov-ernance and distributive executive power - core to co-operative organization structure - could have prevented or mitigated the contributing factors of the reported events. We find that the vast majority (71%) of the recent AI ethics scandals are not the result of a lack of knowledge or tools, but attributed to power dynamics that hinder the ability of internal stakeholders from taking action. We present the co-operative governance structure as a possible mitigating solution to addressing future AI ethics catastrophes, and provide a critical look at practical challenges inherent to AI co-operatives.

2023-05-17

Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy (published)

From Plane Crashes to Algorithmic Harm: Applicability of Safety Engineering Frameworks for Responsible ML

Renee Shelby

Andrew J Smart

Edgar Jatho

Joshua A. Kroll

Negar Rostamzadeh

2023-04-18

Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (published)

openreview.net

Roboethics as a Design Challenge: Lessons Learned from the Roboethics to Design and Development Competition.

Jimin Rhim

Cheng Lin

Alexander Werner

Brandon J. DeHart

Vivian Qiang

How do we make concrete progress towards de-signing robots that can navigate ethically sensitive contexts? Almost two decades after the word… (see more) ‘roboethics’ was coined, translating interdisciplinary roboethics discussions into techni-cal design still remains a daunting task. This paper describes our first attempt at addressing these challenges through a roboethics-themed design competition. The design competition setting allowed us to (a) formulate ethical considerations as an engineering design task that anyone with basic programming skills can tackle; and (b) develop a prototype evaluation scheme that incorporates diverse normative perspectives of multiple stakeholders. The initial implementation of the competition was held online at the RO-MAN 2021 conference. The competition task involved programming a simulated mobile robot (TIAGo) that delivers items for individuals in the home environment, where many of these tasks involve ethically sensitive con-texts (e.g., an underage family member asks for an alcoholic drink). This paper outlines our experiences implementing the competition and the lessons we learned. We highlight design competitions as a promising mechanism to enable a new wave of roboethics research equipped with technical design solutions.

2022-05-22

2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (published)

Sociotechnical Harms: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction

Renee Shelby

Kathryn Henne

Negar Rostamzadeh

Paul Nicholas

N'mah Fodiatu Yilla

Jess Gallegos

Andrew J Smart

Emilio Garcia

Gurleen Virk

2021-12-31

arXiv.org (preprint)

The Role of Robotics in Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - The Experts' Meeting at the 2021 IEEE/RSJ IROS Workshop [Industry Activities].

Vincent Mai

Bram Vanderborght

Tamás Haidegger

Alaa M. Khamis

Niraj Bhargava

Dominik B. O. Boesl

Katleen Gabriels

An Jacobs

Robin R. Murphy

Yasushi Nakauchi

Edson Prestes

Bram Vanderborght

Ricardo Vinuesa

Carl-Maria Mörch

2021-12-31

IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag. (published)

What does it mean to be an AI Ethicist: An ontology of existing roles

With the increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence systems (AIS) in various application and the growing efforts to regulate such system… (see more)s, a new set of occupations has emerged in the industry. This new set of roles take different titles and hold varying responsibilities. However, the individuals in these roles are tasked with interpreting and operationalizing best practices for developing ethical and safe AI systems. We will broadly refer to this new set of occupations as AI ethicists and recognize that they often hold a specific role in the intersection of technology development, business needs, and societal implications. In this work, we examine what it means to be an AI ethicist in the industry and propose an ontology of existing roles under this broad title along with their required competencies. We create this ontology by examining the job postings for such roles over the past two years and conduct expert interviews with fourteen individuals who currently hold such a role in the industry. The proposed ontology will inform executives and leaders who are looking to build responsible AI teams and provide educators the necessary information for creating new learning objectives and curriculum.

2021-12-31

arXiv.org (preprint)

How do AI systems fail socially?: an engineering risk analysis approach

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) has been used as an engineering risk assessment tool since 1949. FMEAs are effective in preemptively… (see more) identifying and addressing how a device or process might fail in operation and are often used in the design of high-risk technology applications such as military, automotive industry and medical devices. In this work, we explore whether FMEAs can serve as a risk assessment tool for machine learning practitioners, especially in deploying systems for high-risk applications (e.g. algorithms for recidivism assessment). In particular, we discuss how FMEAs can be used to identify social and ethical failures of Artificial Intelligent Systemss (AISs), recognizing that FMEAs have the potential to uncover a broader range of failures. We first propose a process for developing a Social FMEAs (So-FMEAs) by building on the existing FMEAs framework and a recently published definition of Social Failure Modes by Millar. We then demonstrate a simple proof-of-concept, So-FMEAs for the COMPAS algorithm, a risk assessment tool used by judges to make recidivism-related decisions for convicted individuals. Through this preliminary investigation, we illustrate how a traditional engineering risk management tool could be adapted for analyzing social and ethical failures of AIS. Engineers and designers of AISs can use this new approach to improve their system's design and perform due diligence with respect to potential ethical and social failures.

2021-10-27

2021 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS) (published)

Design of Hesitation Gestures for Nonverbal Human-Robot Negotiation of Conflicts

Maneezhay Hashmi

H. F. Machiel Van Der Loos

Elizabeth A. Croft

Aude Billard

When the question of who should get access to a communal resource first is uncertain, people often negotiate via nonverbal communication to … (see more)resolve the conflict. What should a robot be programmed to do when such conflicts arise in Human-Robot Interaction? The answer to this question varies depending on the context of the situation. Learning from how humans use hesitation gestures to negotiate a solution in such conflict situations, we present a human-inspired design of nonverbal hesitation gestures that can be used for Human-Robot Negotiation. We extracted characteristic features of such negotiative hesitations humans use, and subsequently designed a trajectory generator (Negotiative Hesitation Generator) that can re-create the features in robot responses to conflicts. Our human-subjects experiment demonstrates the efficacy of the designed robot behaviour against non-negotiative stopping behaviour of a robot. With positive results from our human-robot interaction experiment, we provide a validated trajectory generator with which one can explore the dynamics of human-robot nonverbal negotiation of resource conflicts.

2021-07-10

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (published)

Ethics of Corporeal, Co-present Robots as Agents of Influence: a Review

H. V. D. Van der Loos

2021-04-13

Current Robotics Reports (published)

Can Open Source Licenses Help Regulate Lethal Autonomous Weapons?

Cheng Lin

Lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS, ethal autonomous weapon also known as killer robots) are a real and emerging technology that have th… (see more)e potential to radically transform warfare. Because of the myriad of moral, legal, privacy, and security risks the technology introduces, many scholars and advocates have called for a ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons [1], [2].

2020-12-31

IEEE technology & society magazine (published)