Several honors and award ceremonies took place on the sidelines of the ICSR 2024 gala dinner. Members of the committees were called to the stage of the Anarkist – Beer and Food Lab. In 2024, the general chairs were Oskar Palinko and Leon Bodenhagen, both from the University of Southern Denmark. John-John Cabibihan, Qatar University, was general co-chair. The standing committee was chaired by Shuzhi Sam Ge, National University of Singapore. The program chairs included Kerstin Fischer, University of Southern Denmark, and the special session chairs included Ross Mead, Semio, USA. Competition chair was Amit Kumar Pandey, Rovial Space, France. The publicity chairs included Oliver Bendel, School of Business, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The ICSR is, along with Robophilosophy, the most important conference on social robotics.
Fig.: Committee members on the stage (Photo: Tamara Siegmann)
Robophilosophy 2024 took place for three and a half days in Aarhus (Denmark). It is a biennial dedicated to social robotics. Alongside the ICSR, it is the most important conference in this field. The program was again very extensive. Workshops were held and presentations given in four different tracks. There were keynotes and plenary sessions by well-known names, from Wendell Wallach to Hiroshi Ishiguro. After a sunny start, it began to rain, which made it all the easier to concentrate on the scientific exchange. In the end, the sun came out again in time for the closing event. Johanna Seibt, the brains behind Robophilosophy, received a bouquet of flowers and a standing ovation. The experts will meet again in two years‘ time. Where has not yet been decided. A few potential hosts spoke up. Edinburgh would be an option, but so would California.
On the fourth day of Robophilosophy 2024, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Professor at the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, gave a talk entitled „AI Avatars and the Future Society“. From the abstract: „In this lecture, the presenter will report on the research and development of remotely operated robots and CG agents, also known as avatars. Avatar technology has advanced significantly in recent years, thanks to progress in AI technology. We will discuss the various services that can be deployed using avatars and the kind of society we can realize as a result.“ (Website Robophilosophy 2024) After the lecture, the roboticist was questioned by Raja Chatila, Sorbonne University (France), and Mihaela Constantinescu, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest (Romania). Hiroshi Ishiguro had been a regular guest at Robophilosophy. In 2018, he appeared on site in Vienna.
On the fourth day of Robophilosophy 2024, Oliver Bendel, Professor at the FHNW School of Business, gave a talk entitled „The Universal Robot of the 21st Century“. From the abstract: „Developments in several areas of computer science, robotics, and social robotics make it seem likely that a universal robot will be available for the mass market in the foreseeable future. Large language models for communication, perception, and control play a central role in this. This article briefly outlines the developments in the various areas and uses them to create the overall image of the universal robot. It then discusses the associated challenges from an ethical and social science perspective. It can be said that the universal robot will bring with it new possibilities and will perhaps be one of the most powerful human tools in physical space. At the same time, numerous problems are foreseeable, individual, social, and ecological.“ (Website Robophilosophy 2024) This was followed by an intensive plenary discussion on the design and usefulness of universal robots. In an individual discussion, Oliver Bendel suggested designing universal robots like early humans or apes. They can move on all fours, but can also stand up on two legs if the situation requires it. This would at least solve some of the safety problems posed by bipeds.
Fig.: Oliver Bendel after his talk (Photo: Katharina Kühne)
On the third day of Robophilosophy 2024, Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute (USA), gave a keynote speech entitled „AI’s Challenge to Understanding the World“. From the abstract: „I will survey a debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on the extent to which current AI systems can be said to “understand” language and the physical and social situations language encodes. I will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, hypothesize about what humanlike understanding entails, and discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems.“ (Website Robophilosophy 2024) In this keynote – as in previous keynotes and presentations – the restrictions of AI and generative AI were emphasized. In response to a question from an audience member, the potential was also acknowledged.
On the first day of Robophilosophy 2024, Wendell Wallach, one of the fathers of machine ethics, gave a keynote speech entitled „Re-envisioning Ethics: From Moral Machine to Extensive Regulation“. From the abstract: „Have we been underestimating the socio-technical challenges posed by ro(bot)s – physical systems and virtual bots? Many of the complexities inherent in managing intelligent systems can not be adequately met by scientific innovation, existing ethical constraints, or weak regulations forged by legislatures under the capture of the AI oligopoly. In spite of naive future projections, the science we have, and are likely to have in the near future, will not produce AI systems capable of making even satisfactory choices in complex situations where uncertainty reigns, multiple values converge, and the information available is inadequate to project meaningful consequences for various courses of action. AI will pose safety and security risks far beyond those being addressed by the pittance of investment presently directed to build trustworthy systems. Scientific humility is needed. Ethics must be reenvisioned and empowered to work through the plethora of socio-technical obstacles and trials ahead. A vast infrastruture to ensure AI safety will be required.“ (Website Robophilosophy 2024) Wendell Wallach went far beyond these hints and gave an overview of the advances and setbacks in machine ethics and AI ethics in recent decades.
The deadline for the International Conference on Social Robotics 2024 (ICSR 2024) has been extended again. Experts in social robotics and related fields have until July 19 to submit their full papers. The prestigious event was last held in Florence (2022) and Qatar (2023). Now it enters its next round. The 16th edition will bring together researchers and practitioners working on human-robot interaction and the integration of social robots into our society. The title of the conference includes the addition „AI“. This is a clarification and demarcation that has to do with the fact that there will be two further formats with the name ICSR in 2024. ICSR’24 (ICSR + AI) will take place as a face-to-face conference in Odense, Denmark, from 23 to 26 October 2024. The theme of this year’s conference is „Empowering Humanity: The role of social and collaborative robotics in shaping our future“. The topics of the Call for Papers include „collaborative robots in service applications (in construction, agriculture, etc.)“, „Human-robot interaction and collaboration“, „Affective and cognitive sciences for socially interactive robots“, and „Context awareness, expectation, and intention understanding“. The general chairs are Oskar Palinko, University of Southern Denmark, and Leon Bodenhagen, University of Southern Denmark. More information is available at icsr2024.dk.
In late August 2023, AAAI announced the continuation of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, to be held at Stanford University from 25-27 March 2024. Due to staff shortages, the prestigious conference had to be held at the Hyatt Regency SFO Airport in San Francisco in March 2023 – and will now return to its traditional venue. The call for proposals is available on the AAAI Spring Symposium Series page. Proposals are due by 6 October 2023. They should be submitted to the symposium co-chairs, Christopher Geib (SIFT, USA) and Ron Petrick (Heriot-Watt University, UK), via the online submission page. Over the past ten years, the AAAI Spring Symposia have been relevant not only to classical AI, but also to roboethics and machine ethics. Groundbreaking symposia were, for example, „Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents“ in 2016, „AI for Social Good“ in 2017, or „AI and Society: Ethics, Safety and Trustworthiness in Intelligent Agents“ in 2018. More information is available at aaai.org/conference/spring-symposia/sss24/.
Fig.: Hoover Tower on the Stanford University campus
Robophilosophy 2022 is the fifth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series. The first call for papers (CfP) was published in November 2021, and the second at the end of 2021. The extended deadline for submissions of extended abstracts and full papers is February 28, 2022. The event „will explore the societal significance of social robots for the future of social institutions with its usual broad scope, embracing both theoretical and practical angles“ (CfP Robophilosophy). It „is an invitation to philosophers and other SSH researchers, as well as researchers in social robotics and HRI, to investigate from interdisciplinarily informed perspectives whether and how social robotics as an interdisciplinary endeavour can contribute to the ability of our institutions to perform their functions in society“ (CfP Robophilosophy). Topics of interest are robots and social institutions in general, robots in law and policing, robots in healthcare, and robots and social justice, amongst others. The conference will be held at the University of Helsinki in Finland from August 16-19, 2022. More information via www.rp2022.org.
From 18 to 21 August 2020, the Robophilosophy conference took place. Due to the pandemic, participants could not meet in Aarhus as originally planned, but only in virtual space. Nevertheless, the conference was a complete success. At the end of the year, the conference proceedings were published by IOS Press, including the paper „The Morality Menu Project“ by Oliver Bendel. From the abstract: „The discipline of machine ethics examines, designs and produces moral machines. The artificial morality is usually pre-programmed by a manufacturer or developer. However, another approach is the more flexible morality menu (MOME). With this, owners or users replicate their own moral preferences onto a machine. A team at the FHNW implemented a MOME for MOBO (a chatbot) in 2019/2020. In this article, the author introduces the idea of the MOME, presents the MOBO-MOME project and discusses advantages and disadvantages of such an approach. It turns out that a morality menu could be a valuable extension for certain moral machines.“ The book can be ordered on the publisher’s website. An author’s copy is available here.
