RMWS 2024: Where no proxy has gone before: avatars & responsibility frameworks

Keynote and guest speakers include:

Paula Sweeney (University of Aberdeen) 

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 (Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) 

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 (Keele University) 

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 (Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) 

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 (Augmented Human Lab, Singapore)

Alex is a researcher specializing in innovative technology with a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Chalmers Technical University, Sweden. Throughout his career, he has focused on impactful projects involving computer vision and AI. During his postdoc at the Augmented Human Lab in Singapore and MIT Media Lab in the USA, Alex developed a wearable ring with a camera and AI that aids individuals with low vision by facilitating text reading and scene comprehension. Transitioning to preventive healthcare, he co-founded and led the development of a wearable device for knee rehabilitation monitoring, collaborating with surgeons from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Alex also created a web application with 800,000 monthly users in Romania. Passionate about leveraging technology for social good, he is dedicated to projects that positively impact society. Throughout his international journey, Alex has maintained strong ties to Romanian diaspora communities. Now back home, he eagerly seeks opportunities to collaborate with like-minded individuals and contribute meaningfully to his native country. 

Call for submissions: We have two open slots for workshop talks and four open slots for workshop posters. To this end, we welcome submissions of abstracts (maximum 500 words, excluding references) on topics relating to avatars (both digital and robotic) and responsibility. Please send your anonymized abstract and short bio by 25 August 2024 to avataresponsibility@ccea.ro. Successful candidates will be notified by the end of August. Although full costs cannot be covered, there might be several (partial) travel reimbursements available for PhD students and post-doctoral researchers without current funding.

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.