Seminar on February 1, 2021

Title

The scope of autonomy in autonomous systems and ethics of decisions: a user-interacting perspective

Speaker

Prof. Paola Inverardi, University of L’Aquila, Italy

When and Where

February 1, 2021, 16:00-17:00
Online on Zoom, see TAS Resilience Node for registration or send an email to Valeria Cardellini

Abstract

Autonomous systems make decisions independently or on behalf of the user. This will happen more and more in the future, with the widespread use of AI technologies in the fabric of the society that impacts on the social, economic and political sphere. Automatizing services and processes inevitably impacts on the user’s prerogatives and puts at danger their autonomy and privacy. From a societal point of view It is therefore crucial to understand which is the space of autonomy that a system can exercise without compromising laws and human rights.

In this talk I will try to dig into this challenge by making use of philosophical proposals concerning ethics in the digital societies and software engineering design methodologies. In particular I will cast the problem of designing the scope of decisions of an autonomous system in the setting of architectural design where autonomous systems interact within a society, characterized by collective ethical values, with multiple and diverse users, each of them characterized by her individual moral preferences.

Speaker’s Short Bio

Paola Inverardi is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy, where she was also the Rector from 2013 to 2019. Her research interests include the field of the application of rigorous techniques to the development of software systems, including software specification and verification of concurrent and distributed systems, software architectures, and synthesis of connectors. Her current research interests include the field of software architectures addressing the verification and analysis of software architecture properties, both behavioral and quantitative, the synthesis of correct by construction distributed systems, and responsible computing. She is a member of the EUACM and the Academia Europaea. She received the Honorary Doctorate from Mälardalen University and Shibaura University.