With an anticipated 39.5 million domestic/household robots expected to be in our homes by 2021 (IFR, 2018), Cranfield University is calling for members of the public to comment on a survey launched to identify people's views on robot ethics. Dr Sarah Fletcher, Head of Cranfield University's Industrial Psychology and Human Factors research group who are managing the survey, said: "With the increasing ways in which robots and robotic systems are impacting on our everyday lives, it is important that we have ethical standards that are informed by public opinion. "While some of the scenarios in the survey may seem futuristic and far-fetched, they are potentially just around the corner as we have already seen a rapid rise in robot technology in domestic settings. Who would have thought 10 years ago that a robot could be vacuuming your floor or mowing your lawn?" The survey explores how comfortable people would be with various robot roles and responsibilities in six different scenarios to enable designers, developers and manufacturers to understand how people feel about accepting robots and AI into their everyday lives. Respondents of the survey so far have revealed that people remain sceptical about the roles they would feel comfortable handing over to domestic robots, with more than 60% believing there should be a limit to what a domestic robot should be allowed to do. M. Osman Tokhi, Professor at London South Bank University and Chair of the Ethics of Robots and Autonomous Systems sub-committee, said: "The robotics technology is advancing at a fast pace and as robots will continue to share the same environment with us in various sectors of life, new challenges and ethical issues are expected to emerge.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing industry that's perpetually impressing people with what's possible. Those advancements wouldn't happen without the people working tirelessly to research innovations. Many of the people pushing artificial intelligence forward are male, and that's evidence of a known gender gap associated with the industry. Concentrated efforts are needed to tackle the problem, but it's a situation that could change. The five women here are among those leading the way in AI research and inspiring everyone by their dedication.

Artificial intelligence has been the stuff of mad dreams, and sometimes nightmares, throughout our collective history. We've come a long way from a 15th-century automaton knight crafted by Leonardo da Vinci. Within the past century, artificial intelligence has inched itself further into our realities and day to day lives and there is now no doubt we're entering into a new age of intelligence. Early computing technology ushered in a new branch of computer science dealing with the simulated intelligence of machines. In recent history, we've used A.I. for common tasks, such as playing against the computer in chess matches and other gameplay behaviors.

Artificial intelligence has been the stuff of mad dreams, and sometimes nightmares, throughout our collective history. We've come a long way from a 15th century automaton knight crafted by Leonardo da Vinci. Within the past century, artificial intelligence has inched itself further into our realities and day to day lives and there is now no doubt we're entering into a new age of intelligence. Early computing technology ushered in a new branch of computer science dealing with the simulated intelligence of machines. In recent history, we've used AI for common tasks, such as playing against the computer in chess matches and other game play behaviors.

The items in this collage were selected from the AI TOPICS Web site's "AI in the News" collection that can be found--complete with links to the item's source and related AI TOPICS pages--at www. Please note that: (1) an excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the item, nor contain all of the relevant information; and, (2) all items are offered "as is" and the fact that an item has been selected does not imply any endorsement whatsoever. 'We are studying the application of the RAHS concepts and tools to the social, and economic and financial domains,' Nathan wrote in an email interview." "To literally live with robots, that are highly likely to become more intelligent and physically closer to humans in the future, Koreans are devising the world's first robot ethics charter that will prevent robots from doing harm to people, and block humans from taking advantage of robots for unscrupulous purposes, according to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy. Under the civil-government partnership, the Robot Ethics Charter is being drafted by 12 Korean professionals including a government official, robotics professors, psychology experts and medical doctors.... To science fiction fans, the move to produce a robot ethics charter might remind them of the'Three Laws of Robotics' presented by U.S. author Isaac Asimov in his book Runaround originally published in 1942....

The International Conference on Robot Ethics and Safety Standards (ICRESS-2017) took place in Lisbon, Portugal, from 20th to 21st October 2017. Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira and João Silva Sequeira coordinated the conference with the aim to create a vibrant multidisciplinary discussion around pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues of the rapid introduction of robotic technology in many environments. There were several fascinating keynote presentations. Mathias Scheutz' inaugural speech highlighted the need for robots to act in a way that would be perceived as using moral principles and judgement. It was refreshing to see that we could potentially have autonomous robots that arrive at appropriate decisions that would be seen as "right" or "wrong" by an external observer.

We are not used to the idea of machines making ethical decisions, but the day when they will routinely do this - by themselves - is fast approaching. So how, asks the BBC's David Edmonds, will we teach them to do the right thing? The car arrives at your home bang on schedule at 8am to take you to work. You climb into the back seat and remove your electronic reading device from your briefcase to scan the news. There has never been trouble on the journey before: there's usually little congestion.

Last week I had the pleasure of debating the question "does AI pose a threat to society?" with friends and colleagues Christian List, Maja Pantic and Samantha Payne. The event was organised by the British Academy and brilliantly chaired by the Royal Society's director of science policy Claire Craig. One Friday afternoon in 2009 I was called by a science journalist at, I recall, the Sunday Times. He asked me if I knew that there was to be a meeting of the AAAI to discuss robot ethics. I said no I don't know of this meeting.

There was the voice recognition software that struggled to understand women, the crime prediction algorithm that targeted black neighbourhoods and the online ad platform which was more likely to show men highly paid executive jobs. Concerns have been growing about AI's so-called "white guy problem" and now scientists have devised a way to test whether an algorithm is introducing gender or racial biases into decision-making. Mortiz Hardt, a senior research scientist at Google and a co-author of the paper, said: "Decisions based on machine learning can be both incredibly useful and have a profound impact on our lives ... Despite the need, a vetted methodology in machine learning for preventing this kind of discrimination based on sensitive attributes has been lacking." A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin The paper was one of several on detecting discrimination by algorithms to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona this month, indicating a growing recognition of the problem. Nathan Srebro, a computer scientist at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and co-author, said: "We are trying to enforce that you will not have inappropriate bias in the statistical prediction."

There was the voice recognition software that struggled to understand women, the crime prediction algorithm that targeted black neighbourhoods and the online ad platform which was more likely to show men highly paid executive jobs. Concerns have been growing about AI's so-called "white guy problem" and now scientists have devised a way to test whether an algorithm is introducing gender or racial biases into decision-making. Mortiz Hardt, a senior research scientist at Google who led the work, said: "Decisions based on machine learning can be both incredibly useful and have a profound impact on our lives ... Despite the need, a vetted methodology in machine learning for preventing this kind of discrimination based on sensitive attributes has been lacking." A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin Hardt's was one of several papers on detecting discrimination by algorithms to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona this month, indicating a growing recognition of the problem. Nathan Srebro, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and co-author, said: "We are trying to enforce that you will not have inappropriate bias in the statistical prediction."