Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira

Mohammad Osman Tokhi

Joao Silva Sequeira

Endre E. Kadar

Gurvinder Singh Virk

This book contains the Proceedings of the International Conference on Robot Ethics, held in Lisbon on October 23 and 24, 2015. The conference provided a multidisciplinary forum for discussing central and evolving issues concerning safety and ethics that have arisen in various contexts where robotic technologies are being applied. The papers are intended to promote the formulation of more precise safety standards and ethical frameworks for the rapidly changing field of robotic applications. The conference was held at Pavilhão do Conhecimento/Ciência Viva in Lisbon and brought together leading researchers and industry representatives, promoting a dialogue that combines different perspectives and experiences to arrive at viable solutions for ethical problems in the context of robotics. The conference topics included but were not limited to emerging ethical, safety, legal and societal problems in the following domains: • Service/Social Robots: Robots performing tasks in human environments and involving close human-robot interactions in everyday households; robots for education and entertainment; and robots employed in elderly and other care applications • Mobile Robots: Self-driving vehicles, autonomous aircraft, trains, cars and drones • Robots used in medicine and for therapeutic purposes • Robots used in surveillance and military functions

International Conference on Robot Ethics: ICRE 2015

A World with Robots

This present book provides valuable insights on the technical, societal and legal challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligent systems in a plethora of different applications, from embodied robotic systems to ML algorithms. Engaging with concerns about equity, privacy, surveillance and respect for human dignity, “Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems” highlights the fundamental factors on which stakeholders’ trust relies, identifying benchmarking, standardisation and certification as milestones grounding and consolidating that future trust. The multidisciplinary approach followed will make this book a valuable resource for all those involved in the production and deployment of AIs, as well as for academia and legal practitioners.

Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems

João Silva Sequeira

Rodrigo Ventura

This book provides an integrated framework for natural and artificial cognition by highlighting the fundamental role played by the cognitive architecture in the dialectics with the surrounding environment and consequently in the definition of a particular meaningful world. This book is also about embodied and non-embodied artificial systems, cognitive architectures that are human constructs, meant to be able to populate the human world, capable of identifying different life contexts and replicating human patterns of behavior capable of acting according to human values and conventions, systems that perform tasks in a human-like way. By identifying the essential phenomena at the core of all forms of cognition, the book addresses the topic of design of artificial cognitive architectures in the domains of robotics and artificial life. Moving from mere bio-inspired design methodology it aims to open a pathway to semiotically determined design.

Cognitive Architectures

This book focuses on the potential benefits that the so-called smart technologies have been bringing to the urban reality and to the management and governance of the city, simultaneously highlighting the necessity for its responsible and ethically guided deployment, respecting essential humanistic values. The urban ecosystem has been, in the last decades, the locus to where the most advanced forms of technological innovation converge, creating intelligent management platforms meant to produce models of energy, water consumption, mobility/transportation, waste management and efficient cities. Due to the coincidence of the punctual overlap of its own genesis with the pandemics outbreak, the present book came to embody both the initial dream and desire of an intelligent city place of innovation, development and equity – a dream present in most of the chapters – and the fear not just of the pandemics per se, but of the consequences that this may have for the character of the intelligent city and for the nature of its relationship with its dwellers that, like a mother, it is supposed to nurture, shelter and protect.

Technological Innovation, Ethics and Inclusiveness

How Smart Is Your City?

Meaning, the complex phenomenon of individuation and the definition of identity are the core theme of this work. Grounded on a theoretical framework that gives particular emphasis to the semiotic process common to all forms of cognition, human cognition is conceived here as specific of organisms that, in the course of their interactions, produce symbolic forms, defining the specific physical, social and cultural environments in which they evolve. Individuation, inherent to that semiotic process, is complex and double-sided. It involves, on one hand, the definition of semantic identities and their acknowledgment as world objects – naming; on the other hand, it comprehends the specific lexical and morphosyntactic strategies different languages have found to designate particular entities – referring. The definition of world objects and its symbolic translation presents variations from language to language. In the second part of the book, we define what we have called a “structure-motivated ontology” to represent how this symbolic translation is accomplished in English and European Portuguese. Plus, we try to show how the nature of this symbolic translation affects structural realisation, namely the individuation of reference and the construal of “one-off referring” expressions.

Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira

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