Symposium – Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us

November 21st 2022 we will organize a symposium on the occasion of the finish of the CoreSAEP project.

You can register for the symposium here: https://ii.tudelft.nl/coresaepregistration/

The symposium ‘Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us’ is organized in conjunction with the PhD defence of Ilir Kola, to celebrate the conclusion of the CoreSAEP project (Computational Reasoning for Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners). CoreSAEP is an NWO Vidi personal grant that was awarded to Birna van Riemsdijk in 2014 to investigate software that takes into account personal norms and values.

The project was awarded in a time where the idea of aligning the behavior of digital technologies with personal norms and values raised some eyebrows. Since then, advances in sensor technology and AI have enabled creation of digital technologies that are more and more interwoven with almost every aspect of our daily lives, collecting data about us and influencing our behavior. This raises questions about how we want to shape this hybrid digital society: how to maintain agency in how we shape our lives with digital technologies, how to account for diversity of people and social contexts, and how to ensure our digital technologies leave space for what they cannot understand?

In this symposium we will take you along on the journey we have taken over the past years in addressing these questions. Our approach is inspired by research on normative multiagent systems. It bridges knowledge representation & reasoning with human-computer interaction, and employs machine learning for those aspects which are hard to model explicitly. We will share our insights on the importance of creating computational models that are meaningful for people, using human-grounded methods for developing these models, and interactive human-machine meaning making for value alignment. The symposium will feature talks by (former) project members and related researchers, as well as a panel discussion on the topic ‘AI Value alignment: reasoning or learning?’. It is followed by the public PhD defence of Ilir Kola.

Programme:

Invited speaker: Caroline Bollen, MSc (Delft University of Technology)

Caroline Bollen completed both bachelor and master education at the Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), with a research internship at the Zuckerman Institute (New York, NY, USA). In the bachelor phase she combined biology and physics, to build a strong foundation for neuroscientific research. In the master phase she combined neuroscience, artificial intelligence and responsible innovation in two research projects on neurotechnology for the blind. For her PhD project she is exploring the concept “empathy” in light of current developments in alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) technology, specifically in relation to autism. This project is part of the “Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies” consortium.

Panel: AI Value alignment: reasoning or learning?

Over the past years, different approaches to norm and value alignment have been developed in the literature. Some take a data-oriented approach by deriving norms and values from the behavior of agents in a system, while others model norms, values and reasoning about them explicitly. During the panel we discuss different approaches to norm and value alignment as well as their advantages, disadvantages and risks and benefits. Finally we explore if and how reasoning and learning approaches could be combined, and which role a hybrid human-machine approach could play in realizing better aligned AI systems. Panel members include the following researchers:

Dr. Matthew Dennis – research fellow Ethics of AI and Persuasive Technologies (TU Eindhoven)
Dr. Maite López-Sánchez – associate professor AI and Ethics (University of Barcelona)
Dr. Pradeep Murukannaiah – assistant professor Engineering socially intelligent agents (TU Delft)
Sanne van Waveren, MSc – PhD candidate Human-robot interaction (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

09:30-10:00 Welcome and Opening
10:00-10:30 Invited talk Caroline Bollen: ““Both different and the same: valuing neurodiversity in technology development”
10:30-10:45 Birna van Riemsdijk: Human-machine alignment via person-centered models, methods and meaning making
10:45-11:00 Ilir Kola: Deriving norms and values through Social Situation Awareness
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-12:00 Myrthe Tielman and Pei-Yu Chen: Understanding and aligning with users: from modelling values to alignment dialogues
12:05-12:45 Panel: ‘AI Value alignment: reasoning or learning?’
12:45-13:00 Closing
13:00-14:00 Lunch
15:00-17:00 PhD defence Ilir Kola: ‘Enabling Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents’

Practical information:

Organizers:

Birna van Riemsdijk (University of Twente, chair)
Myrthe Tielman (TU Delft, local organization chair)