CAREER: Computational Ethics in Human-Scale Autonomous Systems

创建自主的、更新自己的目标并在日常生活中与人类互动的智能系统，长期以来一直是系统工程、机器人和人工智能的驱动力。示例系统包括医院中的护理机器人、自动驾驶车辆以及与人类合作的工作机器人。这些系统中明确的道德意识被认为是与人类成功进行日常互动的必要条件。然而，到今天为止，用于设计道德装备的自主智能系统（AIS）的算法相对较少，工具甚至更少，特别是当与物理控制回路集成时。本研究发展具伦理性的具身人工智能系统的计算理论与形式化设计工具，主要探讨具伦理性的具身人工智能系统的模型检验、控制器综合、以及从数据中学习的约束、形式化伦理准则等设计任务。这些准则采取义务声明（“机器人应当在更大的痛苦中照顾病人”）、许可声明（“允许机器人向传染病患者提供口罩”）和禁止声明（“禁止机器人将性别因素纳入护理决定”）的形式。调查人员将这些义务、责任和禁令形式化为道义逻辑，作为项目的一部分。采用软件工程、最优控制和深度学习的方法来创建一个设计管道，允许使用不同的指导方针进行透明和严格的实验。针对大学生和高中生的教育计划补充了该研究的目标，即让社区和来自不同学科的专业人士评估自主系统制造商的主张，并确定其与社区价值观的一致性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The creation of intelligent systems that are autonomous, update their own objectives, and interact with humans in their daily lives, has long been a driving force in systems engineering, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. Example systems include nursing robots in hospitals, self-driving vehicles, and worker bots collaborating with humans. An explicit ethical awareness in these systems is recognized as a necessary condition for successful daily interaction with humans. However, to this day, there are comparatively few algorithms, and even fewer tools, for designing ethics-equipped Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), especially when integrated with a physical control loop. This research develops a computational theory and formal design tools for ethics-equipped embodied AIS.The project focuses on the design tasks of model-checking, controller synthesis, and constrained learning from data, of formalized ethical guidelines. Such guidelines take the form of statements of Obligation (`The robot ought to care for the patient in greater pain'), Permission (`The robot is permitted to offer a mask to a contagious patient') and Prohibition (`The robot is forbidden from factoring gender into care decisions'). The investigators formalize such Obligations, Permissions and Prohibitions in a deontic logic developed as part of the project. Methods from software engineering, optimal control, and deep learning, are employed to create a design pipeline that allows transparent and rigorous experimentation with different guidelines. An education plan for undergraduate and high-school students complements the research’s goal of enabling communities and professionals from different disciplines to assess the claims of autonomous systems manufacturers and determine their alignment with community values.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.