Madeleine Clare Elish

Madeleine Clare Elish will discuss Autonomous Vehicle Fleets as Public Infrastructure at 11:30am on Saturday, September 25th at #werobot.

Madeleine Clare Elish previously led the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society, where she and her team investigated the promises and risks of integrating AI technologies into society. Through human-centered and ethnographic research, AI on the Ground sheds light on the consequences of deploying AI systems beyond the research lab, examining who benefits, who is harmed, and who is accountable. The initiative’s work has focused on how organizations grapple with the challenges and opportunities of AI, from changing work practices and responsibilities to new ethics practices and forms of AI governance.

As a researcher and anthropologist, Madeleine has worked to reframe debates about the ethical design, use, and governance of AI systems. She has conducted field work across varied industries and communities, ranging from the Air Force, the driverless car industry, and commercial aviation to precision agriculture and emergency healthcare. Her research has been published and cited in scholarly journals as well as publications including The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Vice, and USA Today. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and an S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT.

The #WeRobot poster session will take place at 6:15pm on Friday, September 24. Short video previews of each poster will be available during the Lighting Poster Session at 12:30pm. The session will showcase several of the most late-breaking research developments and projects in robotics.

Privacy’s Algorithmic Turn

By Maria P. Angel

Maria P. Angel

• The increasing relevance of algorithms has created a pivot in American legal scholars’ privacy discourse, broadening the scope of privacy’s values and rights and pushing scholars to rethink the very nature of privacy.
• My research aims to trace how American legal scholars’ conception of the right to privacy has changed in the last 30 years.
• I intend to conduct document analysis of documents from the Privacy Law Scholars Conferences (PLSC), as well as use the Science, Technology, and Social Studies (STS) theory of “sociotechnical imaginaries” as my theoretical framework to make sense of the changing nature of privacy.

Egalitarian Machine Learning

By Clinton Castro, David O’Brien and Ben Schwan

Clinton Castro

David O’Brien

Ben Schwan

• The increased reliance on prediction-based decision making has been accompanied by growing concerns about the fairness of the use of this technology, made more difficult by the lack of a consensus definition of “fairness” in this context.
• Fairness, as used in the fair machine learning community, is best understood as a placeholder term for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations, namely to not be wrongfully discriminatory.
• We are interested in exploring how to choose a fairness measure within a context. We present a general picture for thinking about the choice of a measure and talk about the choiceworthiness of three measures (“fairness through unawareness”, “equalised odds”, and “counterfactual fairness”).

Exploring Robotic Technologies to Mediate and Reduce Risk in Domestic Violence

By Mark Juszczak

Mark Juszczak

• I am researching applications of robotic technologies to reduce domestic violence using two different perspectives: a problem-based perspective and a robotics-platform based perspective.
• The problem-based perspective seeks to classify the spatial-temporal conditions under which a quantifiable threat or hazard of domestic violence occurs for women.
• The robotics-platform based perspective seeks to determine the functional limits of embodied AI in providing an enhanced security function to mediate and reduce domestic violence.

Examining Correlations between Human Empathy and Vicbots

By Catherine McWhorter

Catherine McWhorter

• This project focuses on robots capable of fulfilling victim roles – “vicbots” – and defines them as anthropomorphic bots with advanced a.i. that plead for the cessation of harm.
• Whether or not vicbots negatively affect their human agent’s capacity for human-to-human empathy and compassion has implications for the health of the human agent, as well as the overall safety and well-being of communities.
• Federal regulation is difficult due to a lack of consensus in research and discourse, so it is important to first categorize these bots and understand their impacts before moving on to appropriate regulation.

Reported Ethical Concerns Over Use of Robots for COVID-19 and Recommendations for Responsible Innovation for Future Pandemics

By Robin Murphy, Paula Dewitte, Jason Moats, Angela Clendenin, Vignesh Gandudi, Henry Arendes and Shawn Abraham

• The coronavirus pandemic has led to new robots for healthcare, public safety, continuity of work and education, and social interactions.
• As with any new application of technology, this may pose new ethical challenges for civil and administrative law, policy, and professional ethics.
• While responsible innovation typically takes a lengthy engagement of direct and indirect stakeholders, disasters require immediate action, so we propose a short-term framework for stakeholders and roboticists to perform a proactive demand analysis.

Artificial Intelligence: The Challenges For Criminal Law In Facing The Passage From Technological Automation To Artificial Autonomy

By Beatrice Panattoni

Beatrice Panattoni

• The project aims to analyze the possible and future criminal policies regarding the regulation of harms related to the use and functioning of AI systems.
• A possible technically oriented classifications of “AI crimes” will be suggested, organized into  three groups:
  • (1) Cases where the AI system is used by a criminal agent as the means to realize the crime;
  • (2) Cases where the AI system is the “object” against which is committed the crime; and
  • (3) Cases where the realization of a crime is caused by the emergent behavior of an AI system.
• The main issue is whether there is still space for criminal law when it comes to harms related to emergent behavior of an AI system, and, if so, what kind of criminal policies are better suited in this context; we outline possible scenarios in this presentation.

Roboethics to Design & Development Competition: Translating Moral Values Into Practice

By Jimin Rhim, Cheng Lin and Ajung Moon

Jimin Rhim

Cheng Lin

Ajung Moon

• As robots enter our everyday spaces, human-robot interactions with ethically sensitive situations are bound to occur. For instance, designing a robot to evaluate whether to obey a teenager’s request to fetch alcohol remains a socio-technical challenge.
• Our proposed project addresses this by hosting a first-of-its-kind global robotics design competition to explore new  ways of considering human values and translating this information for robots.
• In addition to illuminating the translation process, the accumulated competition results will form the basis for an in-depth ethics audit framework to evaluate interactive robotic systems.

How Do AI Systems Fail Socially? Social Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) for Artificial Intelligence Systems

By Shalaleh Rismani and Ajung Moon

Shalaleh Rismani

Ajung Moon

• Developers of Artificial Intelligent Systems (AIS) have unearthed various sociotechnical failures in many applications, including inappropriate use of language in chatbots and discriminatory automated decision support systems.
• Our open-ended research question is: how can AIS developers use FMEAs as one of the tools for creating accountability and improving design for sociotechnical failures?
• In this work, we build on Raji et al.’s end-to-end auditability framework and develop a novel FMEA process that allows developers to effectively discover AIS’s social and ethical failures.

Nudging Robot Engineers To Do Good: Developing Standards for Ethical AI and Robot Nudges

By John Sullins, Sean Dougherty, Vivek Nallur and Ken Bell

John Sullins

Ken Bell

Vivek Nallur

• HyperNudging or A/IS (autonomous Intelligent systems) Nudging allows programmers to engage in changing the behavior of users, such as encouraging exercise when a user has been sedentary, as opposed to simply predicting the value of some variable.
• Soon, we will see more robot systems designed to do similar things on a larger scale, such as promoting safe behavior in public spaces, helping officials monitor public health or enforce quarantines, or encouraging people to stay longer in shops, museums and malls.
• In this poster, we describe two use case scenarios of A/IS Nudging and show how new standards are being designed to help engineers build systems that are attuned to producing more ethical outcomes.

Machine Learning Algorithms in the Administrative State: The New Frontier for Democratic Experimentalism

By Amit Haim

Amit Haim

• Administrative agencies are utilizing machine learning (ML) algorithms to ameliorate inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. Due to the leeway these agencies have, especially at the local level,  there is significant variation in agencies’ procedures, which may lead to reduced transparency and accountability.
• Nevertheless, prescriptive approaches fail to recognize that flexible schemes are important for enhancing the values the administrative state often lacks; schemes are likely to stifle innovation and urge agencies to stick to the status quo.
• I argue that internal governance processes (e.g., partnerships, independent evaluations) can promote transparency while addressing problems in algorithms such as disparities and opacity.

At We Robot we ask (and expect) that everyone reads the papers scheduled for Days One and Two in advance of those sessions. (The Workshops do not have advance papers.) In most cases, authors do not deliver their papers. Instead we go straight to the discussant’s wrap-up and appreciation/critique. The authors respond briefly, and then we open it up to Q&A from our fabulous attendee/participants. Download the program to your calendar. Download a zip file of Friday’s papers and Saturday’s papers.

We Robot 2021 will be hosted on Whova. We’ve prepared a We Robot 2021 Attendee Guide. You can also Get Whova Now.

If you have not yet registered, the Registration Page awaits you.

Meg Leta Jones

Meg Leta Jones will discuss Driving Into the Loop: Mapping Automation Bias & Liability Issues for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems at 5:15pm on Friday, September 24th at #werobot.

Meg Leta Jones is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy, memory, innovation, and automation in digital information and computing technologies. She is also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab, and visiting faculty at the Brussels Privacy Hub at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Meg Leta Jones’s research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology. Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten, Meg’s first book, is about the social, legal, and technical issues surrounding digital oblivion. Her second book project, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy, tells the transatlantic history of digital consent through the lens of a familiar technical object. She is also editing a volume with Amanda Levendowski called Feminist Cyberlaw that explores how gender, race, sexuality and disability shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. More details about her work can be found at MegLeta.com and iSPYlab.net.

Veronica Ahumada-Newhart (discussant)

Veronica Ahumada-Newhart will discuss Social Robots and Children’s Fundamental Rights: A Dynamic Four-Component Framework for Research, Development, and Deployment at 3:45pm on Friday, September 24th at #werobot.

Dr. Newhart received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Irvine. She completed her M.Ed. in Adult Education from the University of Georgia and her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Loma Linda University. Prior to beginning her doctoral work, Dr. Newhart was a public health leader in her role as Director of Oral Health programs for the state of Montana. Her work in oral health supported key measures of Montana’s Title V Maternal and Child Health block grant and developed strong collaborations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

She is an NIH funded postdoctoral fellow in UC Irvine’s Institute for Clinical Translational Science. Her research is focused on the use of interactive technologies (e.g., telepresence robots) to establish or augment social connectedness for improved health, academic, and social outcomes. Her research encompasses strong interdisciplinary efforts between UCI’s School of Medicine, School of Education, Department of Informatics, and Department of Cognitive Sciences. Her research interests include child health and human development, virtual inclusion, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and emerging technologies that facilitate learning, human development, and social connectedness.

Daniel Susser

Daniel Susser will discuss Being “Seen” vs. “Mis-seen”: Tensions Between Privacy and Fairness in Computer Vision at 11:30am on Friday, September 24th at #werobot.

Daniel Susser is a philosopher by training and works at the intersection of technology, ethics, and policy. His research aims to highlight normative issues in the design, development, and use of digital technologies, and to clarify conceptual issues that stand in the way of addressing them through law and other forms of governance. He currently focuses on questions about privacy, online influence, and automated decision-making.

He is the Haile Family Early Career Professor and assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences & Technology, research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, and affiliated faculty member in the Philosophy Department at Penn State University. From 2016-18, he was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University. Before that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Information Law Institute at New York University’s School of Law, a member of the Institute’s Privacy Research Group, and a visiting scholar in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.

Ryan Calo

Ryan Calo will discuss The Legal Construction of Black Boxes at 10:00am on Friday, September 24th at #werobot.

Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He is a founding co-director (with Batya Friedman and Tadayoshi Kohno) of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and (with Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird, and Jevin West) the UW Center for an Informed Public. Professor Calo holds adjunct appointments at the University of Washington Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Ryan Calo’s research on law and emerging technology appears in leading law reviews (California Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Columbia Law Review) and technical publications (MIT Press, Nature, Artificial Intelligence) and is frequently referenced by the national media. His work has been translated into at least four languages. Ryan Calo has testified three times before the United States Senate and organized events on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Obama White House. He has been a speaker at the President Obama’s Frontiers Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and NPR‘s Weekend in Washington.

Ryan Calo is a board member of the R Street Institute and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society (CIS), where he was a research fellow, and the Yale Law School Information Society Project (ISP). He serves on numerous advisory boards and steering committees, including University of California’s People and Robots Initiative, the AI Now Initiative at NYU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Without My Consent, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, and the Future of Privacy Forum. In 2011, Ryan Calo co-founded the premiere North American annual robotics law and policy conference We Robot with Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr.

Ryan Calo worked as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Covington & Burling LLP and clerked for the Honorable R. Guy Cole, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Prior to law school at the University of Michigan, Ryan Calo investigated allegations of police misconduct in New York City. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Dartmouth College.

Professor Calo won the Phillip A. Trautman 1L Professor of the Year Award in 2014 and 2017 and was awarded the Washington Law Review Faculty Award in 2019.