Houssam Abbas
Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Oregon State University

Abstract:
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.

This talk will describe some of my research in developing engineering tools for automatic reasoning about 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'). We formalize such Obligations, Permissions and Prohibitions in deontic logic, and develop model-checking and learning algorithms for deontic properties of finite automata. I will then describe the road ahead for the formal study of ethical obligations in autonomous systems.

Houssam Abbas is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. His research interests are in the verification and control of cyber-physical systems and formal ethical theories for autonomous agents, with particular emphasis on unpiloted ground and aerial vehicles. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a design automation engineer at Intel.

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