Pervasive Autonomy: Humans-in-the-loop or Forget-about-them?
The increase in computational and communication power of pervasive devices is also enabling to embed increasing intelligence in devices, there included the capability to act in autonomy, and possibly interacting with each other, in order to achieve specific goals, thus leaving humans out of the decision loop. In this context, the goal of the panel is thus reasoning about the possible implications (technical, ethical, and lega) of assigning great and often critical decision power to pervasive autonomous systems.
Panel Chair
Prof. Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Panelists
Prof. Virginia Dignum, Umea University, Sweden
Prof. Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College London, England
Prof. Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna, Italy
Prof. Gregor Schiele, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Biographies
Franco Zambonelli is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He got his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Bologna in 1997. His research interests include: pervasive computing, multi-agent systems, self-adaptive and self-organizing systems, with applications to healthcare and smart cities. He has published over 130 papers in peer-reviews journals, and has been invited speaker at many conferences and workshops. He is in the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Springer-Nature Computer Science Journal, IEEE Society and Technology Magazine, the BCS Computer Journal, the Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications. He has been scientific manager of the EU FP6 Project CASCADAS and coordinator of the EU FP7 Project SAPERE and of the PRIN 2017 Project Fluidware. He is ACM Distinguished Scientist, member of the Academia Europaea, IEEE Fellow, and has been recipient of the 2018 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award.
Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umea 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 member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). Her current research focus is on the specification, verification and monitoring of ethical and societal principles for intelligent autonomous systems. She is committed to policy and awareness efforts towards the responsible development and use of AI, as member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the working group on Responsible AI of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the World Economic Forum’s Global Artificial Intelligence Council, lead for UNICEF’s guidance for AI and children, the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design, and as founding member of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance. Her book “Responsible Artificial Intelligence: developing and using AI in a responsible way” was published by Springer-Nature in 2019.
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems (published by World Scientific, 2021). His research on sustainable common-pool resource management in cyber-physical and socio-technical system has received two Best Paper awards from the IEEE Conference on Self-Adapting and Self-Organising Systems. He has been an investigator on more than 30 national and European research projects, including the EPSRC Grand Challenge “The Autonomic Grid”. He is deeply concerned with the social impact of technology and issues of ethics, well-being and legitimate governance, and since 2018 he is Editor in Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
Giovanni Sartor is professor for philosophy of law at the University of Bologna. He got the PhD in Legal Sciences in 1987 at the European University Institute in Florence. He has been researcher at the Institute for Legal Documentation of the National Research Council (1990-1996), part time professor of Computer Law at the University of Modena (1988-1997); full professor in Jurisprudence at the Queen’s University of Belfast (1996-1999). Member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law since 1995. Author of more than 120 publications and several books, among which: Artificial Intelligence in Law (Oslo: Tano, 1993); Legal Reasoning: A Cognitive Approach to the law (Springer: 2005); The Law of Electronic Agents (Oslo: Unipubskriftserier, 2003). He has coordinated several national and European research projects in his areas of research, and is recipient of the ERC Advanced Grant “Computable Law”.
Gregor Schiele is full professor for computer science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and leads the research group for embedded systems. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart in 2007. His research focusses on self-organizing pervasive systems, adaptive hardware-software systems, the programmable world, and efficient embedded deep learning, e.g., in cyber physical systems, medical devices, and smart cities. He is a long time PerCom native, having published his first full paper at the first PerCom conference in 2003, and has served in different roles over the years. Before joining the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2014, Dr. Schiele worked in different roles at the National University of Ireland in Galway, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in Ireland, as well as at the Universities of Mannheim and Stuttgart in Germany. During the last twenty years, his research received funding from the DFG, the BMBF, the DAAD, a multitude of industry partners, as well as the EU.