Month: February 2022

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Extended Deadline for the Robophilosophy 2022 Conference

Robophilosophy 2022 is the fifth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series. The first call for papers (CfP) was published in November 2021, the second at the end of 2021, and the final on February 25, 2022. The extended deadline for submissions of extended abstracts and full papers is March 10, 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.

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Dagstuhl Report on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems

On February 18, 2022, the Dagstuhl Report “Conversational Agent as Trustworthy Autonomous System (Trust-CA)” was published. Editors are Effie Lai-Chong Law, Asbjørn Følstad, Jonathan Grudin, and Björn Schuller. From the abstract: “This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 21381 ‘Conversational Agent as Trustworthy Autonomous System (Trust-CA)’. First, we present the abstracts of the talks delivered by the Seminar’s attendees. Then we report on the origin and process of our six breakout (working) groups. For each group, we describe its contributors, goals and key questions, key insights, and future research. The themes of the groups were derived from a pre-Seminar survey, which also led to a list of suggested readings for the topic of trust in conversational agents. The list is included in this report for references.” (Abstract Dagstuhl Report) The seminar, attended by scientists and experts from around the world, was held at Schloss Dagstuhl from September 19-24, 2022. The report can be downloaded via drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/15770/.

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Ethics of Conversational Agents

The Ethics of Conversational User Interfaces workshop at the ACM CHI 2022 conference “will consolidate ethics-related research of the past and set the agenda for future CUI research on ethics going forward”. “This builds on previous CUI workshops exploring theories and methods, grand challenges and future design perspectives, and collaborative interactions.” (CfP CUI)  From the Call for Papers: “In what ways can we advance our research on conversational user interfaces (CUIs) by including considerations on ethics? As CUIs, like Amazon Alexa or chatbots, become commonplace, discussions on how they can be designed in an ethical manner or how they change our views on ethics of technology should be topics we engage with as a community.” (CfP CUI) Paper submission deadline is 24 February 2022. The workshop is scheduled to take place in New Orleans on 21 April 2022. More information is available via www.conversationaluserinterfaces.org/workshops/CHI2022/.