The Interdisciplinary Internet Institute

Two of our contributors, Dr. Christoph Lutz and Aurelia Tamò, are co-organizing with Eduard Fosch Villaronga and Jo Bac a twinned workshop on robotics, to be held in both Barcelona (Spain) and Yokohama (Japan). These workshops take place on 2 and 14 November 2016 and will have the same content and format. Participants can select which workshop they would prefer to attend.

The workshops will analyze the ethical, legal, and social (ELS) issues of social robots in healthcare and therapy settings and will address the ethical, privacy and liability concerns in a constructive and proactive manner.

• Firstly, the twinned workshop deals with aspects of human dignity. It addresses the questions of whether and how social robots endanger individuals’ dignities, for example by robots discriminating against certain population groups.
• Secondly, the twinned workshop discusses the topic of privacy. In this context, social robots, especially those in therapy and education, come with various privacy challenges: surveillance, access to private rooms, excessive data collection, and complex design architectures which conceal robots’ privacy-infringing behavior (black-boxing).
• Thirdly, the twinned workshop handles questions of liability. Social robots create tensions in society and in legal systems because questions such as who or what should be liable for their autonomous acts remain unanswered. In seeking solutions to the problems encountered, we will consider how to allocate liability to different entities such as manufacturers, users, and robots themselves.

The three overarching ELS issues of dignity, privacy and liability shall be discussed in an open workshop format, with the focus on solutions. Researchers from all disciplines, as well as practitioners, are encouraged to submit abstracts stating the ELS problems to be discussed.

 

Feel free to contribute and register at: https://legalaspectsofsocialrobots.wordpress.com/call-for-contributions/how-can-i-register/

To be part of the workshop program you must submit an abstract addressing one of the following key topics:

Topic 1: The changing environment of healthcare and education with the introduction of robots

Topic 2: The ethics and dignity of patients and students

Topic 3: The privacy of patients and students

Topic 4: The liability of robots in the contexts of therapy and education

We encourage the use of concrete cases, yet we are also open to more conceptual and theoretical approaches. The abstract should be between 1 and 2 pages long, with a minimum of 350 and a maximum of 1000 words. Please submit the abstract as a single Word or PDF file by sending it to

The deadline for abstract submissions is July 15, 2016.

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