George Kantor will lead a discussion of Karen Levy, Solon Barocas, & Alexandra Mateescu‘s
Reap What You Sow? Precision Agriculture and The Privacy of Farm Data on Friday, April 12 at 11:30 a.m. at #werobot 2019.

Across rural America, the day-to-day lives of farmers are changing. Traditional forms of land management are rapidly shifting into data management, as global agriculture firms such as Monsanto and John Deere have begun to furnish farm equipment with a variety of sensors that detect and transmit fine-grained information about nearly every aspect of farm conditions and operations, including soil and weather conditions, seeding and fertilizer applications, and crop yield. While monitoring and mechanization have a long history in farming, recent developments in so-called “precision agriculture” aim to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to customizable, plot-specific strategies.

Precision agriculture arose from the fact that productivity in a field can vary widely as a result of differences in terrain, soil, irrigation, and other conditions within and across fields. To mitigate against the unevenness of these starting conditions, precision agriculture aims to measure the exact needs of square units of land, and this information is used to develop farming strategies (called “prescriptions”) tailored to these conditions on a unit-by-unit basis. Precision agriculture refers to a wide range of tools and practices, but generally comprises a combination of equipment-mounted sensors, farm data management software, and analytics services that often combine farm-level data with country-wide agronomic and weather information. Sensor-derived data is used to more closely measure agricultural productivity, to facilitate operational decision-making on the farm, and to meet the data collection standards for compliance with environmental and other regulation that requires reporting to government.

While adoption of such tools has been uneven, precision agriculture techniques are becoming the norm. In 2014, the American Farm Bureau Federation surveyed farmers on the issue of big data in farming, and found that more than half of respondents were planning to invest within the following year or two in additional data-driven technologies. For many farmers, precision agriculture has become necessary for keeping up production and minimizing costs. In particular, farmers have embraced precision agriculture as a way to improve environmental sustainability, while also increasing profits. The more precise application of fertilizer and pesticide, for example, ensures that farms do not apply more than necessary, limiting environmental impact and reducing costs.

More broadly, the industry has begun to look to precision agriculture as a means to build “resilience” into food systems as climate change destabilizes centuries-old food production patterns and practices. Many of these innovations have introduced new forms of data collection and information flow, transforming the information ecology of farming and raising concerns with the privacy of agricultural data in the process.

Kristian Lum will lead a discussion of Alicia Solow-Niederman, YooJung Choi, and Guy Van den Broeck‘s The Institutional Life of Algorithmic Assessment on Friday, April 12, at 10:15 a.m. at #werobot 2019.

On August 28, 2018, California passed the California Money Bail Reform Act, also known as Senate Bill 10 (SB 10), and eliminated the state’s system of money bail, replacing it in part with a risk assessment algorithm. Though SB 10 has been temporarily stayed, pending resolution of a 2020 ballot referendum, we cannot stay the bigger picture questions about risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system. Building from a long-standing critique of actuarial assessments in criminal justice, a rapidly-growing legal and technical literature recognizes that risk assessment algorithms are not automatically unbiased. Research to date tends to focus on fairness, accountability, and transparency within the tools, urging technologists and policymakers to contend with the normative implications of these technical interventions. While questions such as whether these instruments are fair or biased are normatively essential, this Essay contends that looking at these issues in isolation risks missing a critical broader point. Automated risk assessment systems do not operate in a vacuum; rather, they are deployed within complex webs of new and preexisting policy and legal structures.

 

This Essay’s detailed analysis of SB 10 concretely illustrates how algorithmic risk assessments statutes and regulations require tradeoffs and tensions between global and local authority. Specifically, using SB 10 as a not-so-theoretical hypothetical reveals a tension between, on one hand, a top-down, global understanding of fairness, accuracy, and lack of bias and, on the other, a tool that is well-tailored to local considerations. There is a general conceit in the law that a principle like fairness is universal. SB 10’s text and legislative history support this globally-applicable perspective, calling for “validated risk assessment tools” that are “demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable.”

 

Concepts like accuracy, reliability, and non-discrimination are fixed principles from such a legal and policy standpoint. But there is a tension between such global principles and the validation and deployment of a tool in particular jurisdictions (typically at the county level). Anytime there is both a more centralized body that sets overarching guidelines about the tool and a risk assessment algorithm that must be tailored to reflect local jurisdictional conditions, this algorithmic federalism will give rise to a global-local tension. This tension results in a number of technical challenges, including questions about the treatment of proxies, Simpson’s paradox, and thresholding choices. Accordingly, we call for increased attention to the design of algorithmic risk assessment statutes and regulations, and specifically to their allocation of decision-making responsibility and discretion. Only then can we begin to assess the impact of these risk assessment algorithms when it comes to core criminal justice decisions about life and liberty.

 

Bryan Choi will lead a discussion of Petros Terzis‘s The Reasonable Coder on Friday, April 12 at 9:15 a.m. at #werobot 2019.

Algorithmic decision-making tools are no longer a mere field of scientific exploration and academic debates. Today data, code and algorithms, blended altogether in the concept of Machine Learning (ML), are used to identify potential aggressors and victims of violence, to assess a defendant’s risk of committing new crimes, to decide whether you deserve a job opportunity, to –literally- monitor the financial markets or to evaluate school teachers. In light of these ML applications an exponentially growing part of the scientific community has focused its attention on the issues of fairness, transparency and accountability that algorithms should mirror. Building next to these interdisciplinary endeavors for the development of safeguarding techniques, this paper is an attempt to explore the boundaries of liability that surround the agents involved in the development of these tools.

The capacity of these system to interact and trigger changes to the physical world as well as their potential for causing harm to a person, challenges the notions of duty of care, causality and foreseeability that historically dominated liability ascription. In the meantime, the absence of a solid regulation renders developers legally exposed to the rules of strict liability. My paper is a jurisprudential journey throughout the boundaries of contract and tort law of USA jurisdictions aiming at extracting common principles that could shape the proposed doctrine of the “Reasonable Coder”. This journey starts from the fundamental question of whether “smart-software” should be regarded as “good” or “service”, and progresses to the normative connotation of the concepts of causality and foreseeability in the digital sphere. The notion of “Reasonable Coder” is ultimately premised on the idea that either regarded as “services” or as “products”, “smart-systems” will eventually be examined through the regime of negligence.

Full text of the papers that will be presented at We Robot 2019 are now available on our Program page. If you are attending We Robot we strongly advise you to read the papers before you get to Miami.

We Robot doesn’t work like ordinary conferences: other than on panels, most authors do not present their papers. Rather, we assume everyone has done their homework, and go straight to the response by our expert discussants. What’s more, the discussants only speak for a short time, and then we open it up to your questions and comments. his makes for a much more interesting and engaging events, and takes advantage of the terrific people who come to We Robot – but it does mean that if you haven’t read the papers, you won’t be ready to take full part.

Update: Download all the We Robot 2019 Papers in one convenient zip file.

We’ve posted a revised version of the We Robot 2019 Preliminary Program. Check it out!

	Friday, April 12, 2019
8:30-9:00	Check- in & Breakfast
9:00-9:15	Welcome & Introductions
9:15-10:15	The Reasonable Coder by Petros Terzis (University of Winchester) Discussant: Bryan Choi
10:15-11:15	[Schedule change] Toward a Comprehensive View of the Influence of Artificial Intelligence on International Affairs by Jesse Woo (Kyoto University) Discussant: Heather Roff
11:15-11:30	Break
11:30-12:30	Reap What You Sow? Precision Agriculture and The Privacy of Farm Data by Karen Levy (Cornell University), Solon Barocas (Cornell University), & Alexandra Mateescu (Data & Society Research Institute) Discussant: George Kantor
12:30-12:45	Lightening Poster Session
12:45-1:45	LUNCH
1:45-3:15	Panel: Robot/Human Handoffs Moderator: Madeleine Elish The Human/Weapon Relationship in the Age of Autonomous Weapons and the Attribution of Criminal Responsibility for War Crimes by Marta Bo (Asser Institute, The Hague & Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) Through the Handoff Lens: Are Autonomous Vehicles No-Win for Driver-Passengers by Jake Goldenfein (Cornell Tech); Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley School of Information); Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech) AI, Professionals, and Professional Work: The Practice of Law with Automated Decision Support Technologies by Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley School of Information) & Daniel N Kluttz (UC Berkeley School of Information)
3:15-3:30	Break
3:30-4:30	Robots in Space: Sharing Our World with Autonomous Delivery Vehicles by Mason Marks (Yale Law School & NYU Law School Discussant: Kristen Thomasen
4:30-4:45	Break
4:45-5:45	[Schedule change] The Institutional Life of Algorithmic Risk Assessment by Alicia Solow-Niederman (UCLA School of Law), YooJung Choi (UCLA) & Guy Van den Broeck (UCLA) Discussant: Kristian Lum
5:45-6:00	Closing Remarks
6:00-7:00	Poster Session & Reception Do We Need to Establish Guidelines or Basic Principles for Promoting the Use and Research & Development of AI? by Fumio Shimpo, Takayuki Kato, Kaori Ishii, Takashi Hatae, and Hideyuki Matsumi A Reasonable Expectation of Neural Privacy by Katherine Pratt The VIROS Project: Vulnerability in the Robot Society by Tobias Mahler & Lee Bygrave The Confrontation Clause and Artificial Intelligence by Brian Sites Made By AI: Can AI-Generated Inventions Be Patentable? by Elena Ponte Religion and Robots: How Religious Ideas Shape Societal Attitudes Towards Robotic Technology by Milenko Budimir Rage Against Machine Learning by Aaron Mannes Serious Games: Simulations for Robot Risk Assessment and Communication by Aaron Mannes From Seeds to Bytes: Data Transformations in the Agricultural Sector by Rian Wanstreet Robotic Combat, Control, and Collaboration Through Virtual Twins by Chris Edwards and Tristan Fogt Robots and the Curse of Being by Robin Murphy How Robots and Autonomous Weapon Systems are Changing the Norms and Laws of War by USMA at West Point Professors LTC Chris Korpela, Major Scott Parsons, Major (Retired) Dom Larkin, and Dr. William J. Barry Authoring Identity: Copyright, Privacy, and Commodity Dissonance in the Digital Age by Bita Amani The Theater Method: Exploring Unethical Research Topics in Human-Robot Interaction by Samarendra Hedaoo & Heather Knight
7:30-9:30	Conference Dinner @ Mayfair Hotel, Coconut Grove, Miami, Florida

	Saturday, April 13, 2019
8:00-8:30	Check- in & Breakfast
8:30-9:30	Emerging Legal and Policy Trends in Recent Robot Science Fiction by Robin R Murphy (Texas A&M University) Discussant: Kevin Bankston
9:30-10:30	Taking Futures Seriously: Forecasting as Method in Robotics Law and Policy by Stephanie Ballard (University of Washington) & Ryan Calo (University of Washington) Discussant: Jennifer Rhee Karen Levy (Cornell University)
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-12:00	Administering Artificial Intelligence by Alicia Solow-Niederman (UCLA School of Law Discussant: Michael Froomkin
12:00-1:00	Lunch
1:00-2:00	The Robot Koseki: A Japanese Law Model for Regulating Autonomous Machines by Colin P. Jones (Doshisha Law School) Discussant: Hideyuki Matsumi
2:00-2:30	Break
2:30-3:30	Why the Moral Machine is a Monster by Abby Everett Jaques (MIT) Discussant: Jason Millar
3:30-4:00	Break
4:00-5:30	Panel: AI & Authorship Moderator: Kate Darling Artificial Intelligence Patent Infringement by Tabrez Y Ebrahim (California Western School of Law) [Note: Revised version, Artificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure, published October 2020] The Death of the AI Author by Carys Craig (York University); Ian Kerr (University of Ottawa) Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Is Copyright Protection Justified for Robotic Faux-riginality? by Sarit Mizrahi (University of Ottawa)
5:30-5:45	Final Remarks

We Robot starts with a day of optional Workshops on April 11. Because We Robot is so interdisciplinary, we’ve found it helpful to offer attendees introductions to basic concepts in a variety of fields so that we can all have a common vocabulary.   The workshop day is optional: you can register for it when reserve your place at We Robot 2019 (April 12-13).

Preliminary Schedule (subject to change):

9:00-10:00	This is not Magic: Basic Technical Concepts for the Latest Developments in Robotics & AI	Bill Smart Cindy Grimm
10:00-11:00	Alexa, What’s a Tort? It Sounds Delicious: Basic Legal Concepts for the Latest Developments in Robotics & AI	Ryan Calo (Woodrow Hartzog moderating)
11:00-11:30	Break
11:30-12:30	Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better: Basic Economic Concepts for the Latest Developments in Robotics & AI	Rob Seamans (NYU Stern)
12:30-1:30	Lunch
1:30-2:30	Don’t Look at Me Like That: The Latest Developments in Social Science/Philosophy for Robotics & AI	Madeleine Elish Ari Waldman
2:30-3:30	We’re Not Gonna Take I.T.: Advocacy in Robotics and AI	Jay Stanley (ACLU) Kathrine Pratt
3:30-4:00	Break
4:00-5:00	Get Ready for the Robot Olympics: Japan’s “Robotics 2020” Policy Initiative	Fumio Shimpo, Hideyuki Matsumi, Takayuki Kato (Woody Hartzog moderating)
5:00-6:30	Robots and Academics: The Nerdiest Trivia of All Time (plus light appetizers)	Rebecca Crootof Howard Chizeck Woody Hartzog

Thank you to everyone who submitted papers for We Robot 2019! The Program Committee a very large number of interesting paper proposals, which lead to an acceptance rate of under 20%.

Below we list the accepted papers. A fuller program, including dates and times for panels and presentations, discussants, and including demos and information about the poster session will follow:

• Taking Futures Seriously: Forecasting as Method in Robotics Law and Policy by Stephanie Ballard (University of Washington) & Ryan Calo (University of Washington)
• Using The Robot Koseki – Using Japanese Family Law as a Model for Regulating Robots by Colin P. Jones (Doshisha Law School)
• Reap What You Sow? Precision Agriculture and The Privacy of Farm Data by Karen Levy (Cornell University), Solon Barocas (Cornell University), & Alexandra Mateescu (Data & Society Research Institute)
• Delivery Robots and the Influence of Warehouse Logic on Public Spaces by Mason Marks (Yale Law School & NYU Law School)
• Why the Moral Machine is a monster by Abby Everett Jaques (MIT)
• Emerging Legal and Policy Trends in Recent Robot Science Fiction by Robin R Murphy (Texas A&M University)
• The Institutional Life of Algorithms: Lessons from California’s Money Bail Reform Act by Alicia Solow-Niederman (UCLA School of Law), Guy Van den Broeck (UCLA), & YooJung Choi (UCLA)
• Administering Artificial Intelligence by Alicia Solow-Niederman (UCLA School of Law)
• The Reasonable Coder by Petros Terzis (University of Winchester)
• Toward a Comprehensive View of the Influence of Artifical Intelligence on International Affairs by Jesse Woo (Kyoto University)
• Panel: Robot/Human Handoffs
  • The Human/Weapon Relationship in the Age of Autonomous Weapons and the Attribution of Criminal Responsibility for War Crimes by Marta Bo (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)
  • Through the Handoff Lens: Are Autonomous Vehicles No-Win for Driver-Passengers by Jake Goldenfein (Cornell Tech); Wendy Ju (Cornell Tech); Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley School of Information); Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)
  • AI, professionals, and professional work: The practice of law with automated decision support technologies by Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley School of Information) & Daniel N Kluttz (UC Berkeley School of Information)
• Panel: AI & Authorship
  • Artificial Intelligence Patent Infringement by Tabrez Y Ebrahim (California Western School of Law)
  • That Thou Art Mindful: Emergent creativity and the unromantic author by Ian Kerr (University of Ottawa); Carys Craig (York University)
  • Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Is Copyright Protection Justified for Robotic Faux-riginality? by Sarit Mizrahi (University of Ottawa)
  • We Are Not the Same: Consequences of AI Identity Disclosure on User Expectations and Behavior by Anastasia Usova (NYU Stern); Hallie Cho (INSEAD)

Again, thank you to everyone who submitted paper proposals. We are looking forward to April and could not be more excited about these papers.

Please note: Early Bird Registration closes January 11 — save money by registering now.