The creation of intelligent systems that are autonomous, update their own objectives, and interact with humans in their daily lives, has long been a driving force in systems engineering, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. Example systems include nursing robots in hospitals, self-driving vehicles, and worker bots collaborating with humans. An explicit ethical awareness in these systems is recognized as a necessary condition for successful daily interaction with humans. However, to this day, there are comparatively few algorithms, and even fewer tools, for designing ethics-equipped Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), especially when integrated with a physical control loop. This research develops a computational theory and formal design tools for ethics-equipped embodied AIS.
This talk will describe some of my research in developing engineering tools for automatic reasoning about ethical guidelines. Â Such guidelines take the form of statements of Obligation (`The robot ought to care for the patient in greater pain'), Permission (`The robot is permitted to offer a mask to a contagious patient') and Prohibition (`The robot is forbidden from factoring gender into care decisions'). We formalize such Obligations, Permissions and Prohibitions in deontic logic, and develop model-checking and learning algorithms for deontic properties of finite automata. I will then describe the road ahead for the formal study of ethical obligations in autonomous systems.
Houssam Abbas is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at ¾«¶«Ó°ÊÓ State University. His research interests are in the verification and control of cyber-physical systems and formal ethical theories for autonomous agents, with particular emphasis on unpiloted ground and aerial vehicles. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a design automation engineer at Intel.