ART-AI and University of Bath AI group seminar
We were pleased to have Nirav Ajmeri, a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol, join us for this joint ART-AI and University of Bath AI group seminar. This was a hybrid seminar which took place on Friday 17th February 2023, 12.15pm-1.15pm (GMT) at the University of Bath.
Many thanks to Nirav Ajmeri for speaking and thanks also to Julian Padget for chairing.
The recording of this seminar is now available below along with an abstract and bio.
Title
Ethics in Multiagent Systems
Abstract
Ethics is inherently a multiagent concern—an amalgam of (1) one party’s concern for another and (2) a notion of justice. To capture the multiagent conception, the first part of this talk will introduce ethics as a sociotechnical construct. Specifically, I will describe how ethics can be modelled and analysed, and requirements on ethics (value preferences) can be elicited, in a sociotechnical system (STS). An STS comprises of autonomous social entities (principals, i.e., people and organizations), and technical entities (agents, who help principals), and resources (e.g., data, services, sensors, and actuators). In the second part of the talk, I will discuss recent works on how to (1) specify a decentralized STS, representing ethical postures of individual agents as well as the systemic (STS level) ethical posture, (2) reasoning about ethics, including how individual agents can select actions that align with the ethical postures of all concerned principals; and (3) elicit value preferences (which capture ethical requirements) of stakeholders.
Bio
Nirav Ajmeri is a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol. His research interests are in intelligent agents and multiagent systems with an emphasis on ethics, privacy, and security. Nirav’s research seeks to facilitate engineering a society of socially intelligent agents that act ethically and yield a satisfactory experience to their users. His research has appeared in top AI and computing venues including AAMAS, AAAI, IJCAI, IEEE Computer, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Internet Computing, and ACM TOSEM.
