Ethics by Design: Necessity or Curse?

in Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society AIES 2018, New Orleans, LA, USA, February 02-03, 2018 (2018)

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and ... [more ▼]

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017. [less ▲]

How to Program Organizations and Roles in the JADE Framework

in Multiagent System Technologies, 6th German Conference, MATES 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008. Proceedings (2008)

The organization metaphor is often used in the design and implementation of multiagent systems. However, few agent programming languages provide facilities to define them. Several frameworks are proposed ... [more ▼]

The organization metaphor is often used in the design and implementation of multiagent systems. However, few agent programming languages provide facilities to define them. Several frameworks are proposed to coordinate MAS with organizations, but they are not programmable with general purpose languages. In this paper we extend the JADE framework with primitives to program in Java organizations structured in roles, and to enable agents to play roles in organizations. Roles facilitate the coordination of agents inside an organization and offer new abilities (powers) in the context of organizations to the agents which satisfy the requirements necessary to play the roles. To program organizations and roles, we provide primitives which enable an agent to enact a new role in an organization to invoke powers. [less ▲]

Bridging Agent Theory and Object Orientation: Importing Social Roles in Object Oriented Languages

in Programming Multi-Agent Systems, Third International Workshop, ProMAS 2005 (2006)

Social roles structure social institutions like organizations in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In this paper we describe how to introduce the notion of social role in programming languages. To avoid the ... [more ▼]

Social roles structure social institutions like organizations in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In this paper we describe how to introduce the notion of social role in programming languages. To avoid the commitment to a particular agent model, architecture or language, we decided to extend Java, the most prominent object oriented programming language, by adding social roles. The obtained language allows an easier implementation of MAS’s w.r.t. the Java language. We also show that many important properties of social roles, studied in the MAS field, can be applied to objects. Two are the essential features of social roles according to an analysis reported in the paper: social roles are defined by other entities (called institutions), and when an agent plays a role it is endowed with powers by the institution that defines it. We interpret these two features into the object oriented paradigm as the fact that social roles are objects, which are defined in and exist only inside other objects (corresponding to institutions), and that, through a role, external objects playing the role can access to the object (institution) the role belongs to. [less ▲]

powerJava: ontologically founded roles in object oriented programming language

in Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'06), Track Object Oriented Programming Languages and Systems (OOPS'06) (2006)

In this paper we introduce a new view on roles in Object Oriented programming languages, based on an ontological analysis of roles. A role is always associated with an object instance playing the role and ... [more ▼]

In this paper we introduce a new view on roles in Object Oriented programming languages, based on an ontological analysis of roles. A role is always associated with an object instance playing the role and also to an object instance (its institution) which represents its context. The definition of a role depends on the definition of the institution. This property allows to endow role-players with powers that can modify the state of the institution and of the other roles defined in it. As an example, we introduce a role construct in Java, where the abolve features are interpreted as follows. Roles are implemented as classes, which can be instantiated only in presence of an instance of the player and of an instance of an institution. The definition of a class implementing a role is included in the class of the institution, the role belongs to. Powers are methods which can access private fields and methods of the institution they belong to, and of the other roles of the same institution [less ▲]