Intelligence research, in particular when it involves the creation of technological artifacts displaying human-like intelligence, raises ethical questions. What impact will robotics and AI have on our lives in the future? What are the risks, and how can we control them? To help us address these issues and to guarantee our work’s compliance with ethical standards, we have put together an external ethics advisory board choosing among the greatest experts in the fields of philosophy of artificial intelligence, digital ethics, robotics, and law. Each of the four board members below contributes their experience to monitoring and observing the ethical principles and guidelines used in our experiments and in our research as a whole.
Meet our four members of the Ethics Advisory Board:
Aimee van Wynsberghe, chair
(University of Bonn)
Aimee van Wynsberghe has been working in ICT and robotics since 2004. She began her career as part of a research team working with surgical robots in Canada at CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advance Robotics). She is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Applied Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bonn and co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, as well as a board member of the Institute for Accountability in a Digital Age. She is a 2018 L’Oreal Unesco ‘For Women in Science‘ laureate, and she also serves as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI. In addition, she is a founding board member of the Netherlands AI Alliance and a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), as well as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Artificial Intelligence and Humanity. Aimee van Wynsberghe has been named one of the Netherlands’ top 400 influential women under 38 by VIVA and was named one of the 25 ‘women in robotics you need to know about’. She is author of the book Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design, and Implementation and has been awarded an NWO personal research grant to study how we can responsibly design service robots. She has been interviewed by BBC, Quartz, Financial Times, and other International news media on the topic of ethics and robots, and is often invited to speak at International conferences and summits. Click here for Aimee van Wynsberghe’s homepage.
(Photo courtesy Aimee Van Wynsberghe)
Virginia Dignum
(Umeå University, Sweden)
Virginia Dignum is Professor of Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden and associated with the TU Delft in the Netherlands. She is the director of WASP-HS, the Wallenberg Program on Humanities and Society for AI, Autonomous Systems and Software. She is a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI), a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, of the World Economic Forum’s Global Artificial Intelligence Council, of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethically Alligned Design, and a founding member of ALLAI-NL, the Dutch AI Alliance. She is the author of “Responsible Artificial Intelligence: developing and using AI in a responsible way” published by Springer in 2019.
Click here for Viginia Dignum’s homepage
(Photo by Mikael Hansson)
Raja Chatila
(Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris)
Raja Chatila, IEEE Fellow, is Professor and Director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (UPMC). He is also Director of the Laboratory of Excellence “SMART” on human-machine interaction. He was director of LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse France, in 2007-2010.
His research covers several aspects of Robotics in robot navigation and SLAM, motion planning and control, cognitive and control architectures, human-robot interaction, and robot learning. He works on robotics projects in the areas of service, field, aerial and space robotics. He is author of over 150 international publications on these topics.
Click here to view his homepage.
(Photo Raja Chatila)
Burkhard Schafer
(University of Edinburgh)
Burkhard Schafer studied philosophy, logic, computer linguistics and law in Mainz, Munich and Lancaster before joining the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh in 1996, being awarded a personal chair in Computational Legal Theory in 2010. In 2002, he became one of the founding members of the SCRIPT centre for IT and IP law, and in 2010 its director. His research explores the intersection of law and computer technology, combining an interest in the regulation of technology with the use of technology in the justice system. He is member of the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute, and member of the expert group of AI4People.
Click here to be directed to Burkhard Schafer’s homepage.
(Photo courtesy of Burkhard Schafer)