Speakers: Dr. Houssam Abbas, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Dr. Alicia Patterson, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy

The camera on-board a self-driving car switches to a power-saving mode and takes low-resolution images; as a result, the car hits a pedestrian. A mundane decision to save battery thus becomes a decision to value battery life over human life: all without anyone - or anything - ever explicitly making that choice. While we have long relied on software and automation, the prospect of a fully automated decision process charges many algorithmic decisions with a variety of ethical problems. Where do ethics (and the discipline of Ethics) belong in Artificial Intelligence? What occupies the minds of ethicists and computer scientists working on AI today? This talk will explore how ethicists and engineers think about ethics in Artificial Intelligence. We highlight two approaches engineers have taken to formalizing ethics, the harms these methods may leave unaddressed and analytical tools to understand them.

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 received the NSF CAREER award in 2022, and participated in the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of the National Academies of Engineering in 2022. Prior to OSU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a design automation engineer at Intel.

Alicia Patterson is the Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at OSU. Her research focuses on the ethics of emerging technology, with a special interest on privacy and data ethics. Prior to OSU, Patterson was a postdoctoral fellow at Ethics Lab at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, she worked on developing ethics curriculum for computer science classes as part of the Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University.