Warning: the workshop is cancelled
The autonomous decision capability embedded in software or robot agents is one of the major issues of Artificial Intelligence. It is a core property for AI applications such as e-commerce, serious games, ambient computing, social or collective robotics, companion robots, unmanned vehicles. Autonomous agents decide and act in a given context or environment and under domain constraints, and possibly interact with other agents or human beings e.g. to share tasks or to execute tasks on behalf of others.
As machines and agents have more and more autonomous functions and consequently are less and less supervised by human operators or users, we need to ensure that they do not harm them or threaten their autonomy, especially their decision autonomy. Consequently regulation and control mechanisms to ensure sound and consistent behaviours at the agent’s individual level, at the multi-agent level, and within the human-agent system are a major issue. Moreover, the ethical regulation or control of such autonomous agents has been discussed by several authors. As stated by Rosalind Picard, the greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards.
Organisation models, conversation policies, normative systems, constraints, logical frameworks address the problem of how agents’ autonomous behaviours should be controlled, paving the way for formal or pragmatic definitions of agents’ Rights, Duties and Ethics. The issue is all the more important as autonomous agents may encounter new situations, evolve in open environments, interact with agents based on different design principles, act on behalf of human beings and share common resources. For instance: should an autonomous agent take over the control from a human operator? under which circumstances?
After its first edition at ECAI 2012, RDA2-ETHICS@PAAMS'15 is the 2nd Workshop on Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents with a special emphasis on Ethics, that will take place on June 3rd at the Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS) 2015 in University of Salamanca, Spain