Submissions

We welcome multi-disciplinary participation from all who are interested in exploring this area. Prospective workshop participants are invited to submit:

  • Questions
  • Thought experiments
  • Position statements
  • Ethical stories or experiences from their own HRI practice.

All submissions should be situated within the domain of humans and robots working together collaboratively, often co-presently. We also are interested in focusing more on guidelines for HRI practitioners and policy makers, as opposed to programmable ethics for robots.

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Guidelines for professionals in the HRI community
    • Ethical guidelines / codes of ethics
    • Design guidelines / design codes
    • Experimental guidlines
  • Robot Design
    • Morphology choices for humanoids (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.)
    • Voice and behavior choices
    • Inclusive design for people with disabilities
    • Expectation setting by design
  •  Robots for Vulnerable Populations
    • The ethics of social deception
    • How to preserve privacy and dignity in robot design and deployment
    • Patient rights and responsibilities in robot-assisted health care
  •  Autonomy
    • Ethical autonomy
    • Shared autonomy and control handoffs
    • Appropriate use of wizard-of-oz
  • Ethics and Policy
    • Data collection and privacy
    • Social impact of human worker displacement in the service sector
    • Legal liability issues in robotic design, manufacture, and use
    • Liability laws for human-robot teams
    • The role of regulatory agencies (FDA, FTC, etc)
    • How to work with regulatory agencies as scientists

Inspiration and Examples:

A few examples from the work of the organizers to serve as inspiration the various submission types:

• Riek, Laurel D. and Howard, Don, A Code of Ethics for the Human-Robot Interaction Profession. (2014). In Proceedings of We Robot 2014.

• Moon, A., Danielson, P., and Van der Loos, H.F.M., Survey-based Discussions on Morally Contentious Applications of Interactive Robotics. (2011). International Journal of Social Robotics.

• Solove, Daniel J. and Hartzog, Woodrow, The FTC and the New Common Law of Privacy (2013). 114 Columbia Law Review 583 (2014); GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2013-120; GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 2013-120.

• Calo, R. America Needs a Federal Robotics Agency. Time Magazine, Sept 22, 2014.

• Ethical stories from HRI practice may be heard on this Robots Podcast – an interview with Laurel Riek conducted by AJung Moon.

Format:

Authors should prepare their submission to follow the HRI 2015 publication guidelines. It may be at most two pages in length. It should not be anonymized.

All submissions must clearly identify their challenge theme(s) within their submission (H: Healthcare, M: Morphology, A: Autonomy).

And their submission type(s). (Q: Question, T: Thought experiment, P: Position Statement, E: Ethical Stories from participants own HRI practice). Participants may include a combination of submission types within a single submission, but must ensure each section is clearly labeled. (For example, maybe section 1 contains an ethical story from the participants’ own practice, and section 2 contains questions regarding this ethical situation).

Publication:

In addition to posting accepted submissions to the workshop website, workshop content will be live-tweeted by the Open Roboethics Initiative during the workshop. We also will be publishing a working consensus document for our community on this website as well as on Robohub. Furthermore, the organizers may explore a journal special issue in the near future.