avataResponsibility 2024: Where no proxy has gone before: avatars & responsibility frameworks
Venue: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, 10 & 11 October 2024
Description: Avatars in the form of digital or robotic embodied representations of a person in virtual or physical environments are being deployed in fields such as healthcare, education, social interaction or workspace. Alternatively termed as digital/ robotic twins, clones or duplicates of real humans, personal avatars can be coupled with AI technologies such as (personalized/small/large) Language Models to the extent that their human users do not control them in real time. This seems to raise new challenges in terms of agency ascriptions, (dis)enhancement of human capabilities and oversight, potentially opening new responsibility gaps. The purpose of this two-day workshop is to explore the new set of issues opened by use of digital and robotic avatars, and to assess the limits of our current frameworks of responsibility in relation to these issues.
Organizers:
This is the first of a series of five yearly workshops hosted by the Research Center in Applied Ethics of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, within the framework of the ERC Starting Grant project “avataResponsibility” (Avatar agency. Moral responsibility at the intersection of individual, collective, and artificial social entities in emergent avatar communities). The workshop is part of the larger series of events “Responsibility Matters Workshop Series” (RMWS) that address various facets of the topic of responsibility.
Day 1: Thursday, October 10
10.30 – 11.00: Arrival, welcome coffee & registration
11.00 – 11.05: Introduction & welcome address
11.05 – 12.00: Paula Sweeney (University of Aberdeen): Personal Avatars and the Problem of Uniqueness (Keynote)
12.00 – 12.20: Coffee break
12.20 – 12.50: Stefano Dafarra (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia): Humanoid robotic avatar systems
12.50 – 13.20: Alex Dancu (Augmented Human Lab, Singapore): AI Tools for Navigating Life
13.20 – 14.30: Lunch break
14.30 – 15.00: Faez Aghaee (Aarhus University): Avatars as Representations and the Responsibility Gap
15.00 – 15.30: Mihaela Constantinescu (CCEA, University of Bucharest) – Do GenAI avatars open new responsibility gaps?
15.30 – 16.00: Coffee break & networking
18.00: Conference dinner
Day 2: Friday, October 11
10.30 – 11.00: Arrival & coffee
11.00 – 11.40: Daniele Pucci (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia): Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence (online)
11.40 – 12.20: Kathryn B. Francis (Keele University): Simulated morality: How Virtual Reality has changed our understanding of moral decision-making
12.20 – 12.40: Coffee break
12.40 – 13.10: Fabio Patrone (University of L’Aquila): Virtual personal identity: how to persist in virtual worlds
13.10 – 13.40: Emilian Mihailov (CCEA, University of Bucharest): Artificial agents and the attribution of moral responsibility
13.40 – 14.40: Lunch break
14.40 – 16.00: Round table: Prospects for future research on avatars (for workshop speakers only)
Keynote and guest speakers
Paula Sweeney is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Paula’s recent book, Social Robots: A Fictional Dualism Model, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2023 and she has published a number of articles regarding the ethics of our engagement with social robots. More recently she has been researching the social impact of personal avatars—avatars that represent actual persons.
Daniele Pucci received the bachelor and master degrees in Control Engineering with highest honors from ”Sapienza”, University of Rome, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. In 2013, he earned the PhD title with a thesis prepared at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France. From August 2017 to August 2021, he has been the head of the Dynamic Interaction Control lab, a group of about 20 members focusing on the iCub locomotion walking problem. In this period, Daniele also laid the basis for the “Aerial Humanoid Robotics”, a new branch of Robotics whose main aim is to achieve flying humanoid robots. Since September 2021, Daniele is the PI leading the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence research line at IIT, a team composed of about forty members that combines AI and Mechanics to devise the next generation of the iCub humanoid robot.
Kathryn B. Francis, PhD is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Psychology in the School of Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Keele University (UK) where she leads the Keele Morality Lab. Kathryn also founded and leads the Keele Augmented Virtual and Extended Reality Network (KAVERN) which is a university-wide group within the Digital Society Institute that brings together academics and industry partners who are developing or working with extended reality and digital technologies. Kathryn’s work is cross-disciplinary, and she works across experimental psychology and experimental philosophy with her research focusing on understanding moral conflicts in healthcare and in the context of encouraging sustainable behaviours. Kathryn specialises in the use of Virtual Reality simulations for assessing and measuring moral behaviours and she has published in leading journals including Nature’s Scientific Reports, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology, and British Journal of Psychology. From January 2025, Kathryn will be an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Leeds (UK) where she will continue her work investigating the role of conflict in moral decision-making, utilising virtual simulation across the streams of her research programme.
Stefano Dafarra obtained his M.S. degree in Automation and Control Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2016. He visited the robotics lab at the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida in 2019. He received his Ph.D on Advanced and Humanoid robotics from the University of Genoa working at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in 2020. He is currently a Post-Doc at IIT. He led the technical activities of the iCub Team during the ANA Avatar XPrize international robotic competition. His research interests include teleoperation, optimization, optimal control, and humanoid locomotion.
Alex Dancu is a researcher with a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Chalmers University. During his postdoc at the Augmented Human Lab and MIT Media Lab, he developed a wearable AI camera ring to assist the visually impaired with reading and scene comprehension. His latest project is a social robot for dementia care. His research interests include computer vision, robotics, and AI agents.
Fabio Patrone holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Genoa (Italy) and has served as a visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York City, USA). Currently, he is a post- doctoral researcher at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). Fabio is specialized in the metaphysics of persistence and personal identity, with a particular interest in counterintuitive theses. His work engages with stage view, mereological nihilism, and counterpart relations as they pertain to all allegedly persisting entities, including persons. Recently, he has been captivated by the interplay between personhood and virtual worlds. His current research explores the concept of the “extended person”, drawing on the influential “extended mind thesis” proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Additionally, Fabio is developing a framework to account for our virtual counterparts within the context of personal identity. He is also interested in the metaphysical implications of mereology, the history of modern philosophy—particularly dualism and empiricism—and the philosophy of language.
Mihaela Constantinescu is lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Romania, and executive director of the Research Centre in Applied Ethics (CCEA). Her research areas include virtue ethics, business ethics, Human-Robot Interaction, and AI ethics, with a focus on the normative interplay between the concepts of moral responsibility and moral agency in relation to individuals, organisations, and AI systems. Her articles were published in journals such as Ethics and Information Technology, Philosophy & Technology, International Journal of Social Robotics, Journal of Business Ethics. She is co-author of the book “Institutionalizing ethics: mechanisms and instruments”.
Emilian Mihailov is the Director of the Research Centre in Applied Ethics (CCEA) and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. His research domains are neuroethics, bioethics, and philosophical moral psychology. He has published on the ethics of enhancement and experimental bioethics in leading journals such as American Journal of Bioethics, Science and Engineering Ethics, Bioethics, Consciousness & Cognition. He previously led a national research project dedicated to moral and cognitive enhancement (ENHATEC).
Faez Aghaee is a guest PhD researcher at the Center for Science Studies, Aarhus University. His research focuses on the philosophy of artificial intelligence, particularly on explainable AI (XAI) methods and scientific models, the responsibility gap, and the black box problem. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy of science at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, and holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in philosophy of science from Sharif University of Technology. He also has several experiences as a researcher and project manager in digital transformation, working with both universities and technology companies.
Responsibility Matters Workshop Series (RMWS) invites academics, researchers, industry practitioners, policy makers and NGO representatives to share research findings, prospective projects, field analysis or broad societal concerns revolving around the topic of responsibility.
The year-based event is a forum for open debate of ideas and proposals coming from various research fields as diverse as philosophy, law, computer science, biology, sociology, history or economics, fostering cross-border collaboration between academia and public, private and nongovernmental sectors.
Given the complex nature of responsibility, with its retrospective and prospective dimensions, situated at the intersection of causal, agential, role-based duties and social, moral, legal contexts, the RMWS aims to bring together various pieces of the puzzle through interdisciplinary dialogue between cutting-edge research and practice.