Session details

Logo of the World Congress on Computer Intelligence in Padua, Italy, 18-23 July 2022

Special session: Call for papers

Artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically the ethics around its development and application – has become a contentious issue and the subject of intense political, regulatory and societal debate.

From decisions about bank loans through the use of automated facial recognition in surveillance, AI systems affect the day-to-day lives of people – often without their knowledge.

Over the past few years, governments, non-governmental organisations and businesses have published a plethora of principles and, guidelines and frameworks around the ethics of AI. Common AI themes include:

  • promoting benefits
  • mitigating potential harms
  • improving our power to decide
  • supporting justice
  • assuring explainability
  • responsible design (transparency and accountability)

But despite these common themes, the development of good practice in AI ethics remains highly fragmented. In the absence of regulation or legislation, organizations are typically left to adopt, interpret and implement ethics practices for themselves and there is little or no independent auditing or scrutiny of either practices or outcomes.

Meanwhile, AI development and adoption races ahead, the questions, concerns and priorities of wider and disenfranchised publics remain unheard and in the current climate there is a high risk that ethics gets “left behind.”

This special session aims to discuss solutions to some of these challenges, what safeguards might be required (both technologically and legally) and how we can better present the benefits of Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence to the wider community.

Special session description

This special session focuses on novel technical contributions to the field of AI ethics (including fairness, explainability, risk, accountability and responsibility). We will also consider novel research in the field of data-driven guidelines and recommendations on responsible AI policies, standards, and methodologies; social science studies and recommendations related to the impact of AI on society, as well as surveys of the state-of-the-art in the space of AI ethics.

Research topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Potential effects of AI on the human workforce and distribution of wealth
  • Potential effects of AI on privacy
  • Bias in AI
  • Safety of AI systems embedded in autonomous and automated systems
  • Human-machine trust in AI systems
  • Specific applications of AI and the potential ethical/social benefits
  • Legal implications of AI (eg legal liabilities when things go wrong; how you certify systems that can ‘learn’ from their environment etc)
  • Need and direction for developing formal standards in ethics for AI
  • Citizen perceptions of AI and its impact
  • Empirical research into the ethical impacts of AI systems, including but not limited to impacts of AI on human workforce and distribution of wealth, data privacy, business, economics or manufacturing and politics, human cognition and social relatedness, and security
  • Applications of AI and the potential ethical/social benefits and risks
  • Technical research into the representation, acquisition, and use of ethical knowledge by AI systems.
  • Technical research into solutions for AI, such as bias, fairness, explainability, accountability, responsibility, risk 
  • Data-driven guidelines and recommendations, standard developments.
  • Self-regulation of AI systems

Important deadlines

  • Title and Abstract submission: January 31, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE).
    New submissions cannot be created past this deadline.
  • Complete Paper (pdf) submission: February 14, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE) STRICT DEADLINE
  • Notification of acceptance: April 26, 2022
  • Final paper submission: May 23, 2022

Paper submission

Submit your paper through the conference website.

You must read the author instructions before submitting your paper.

Ensure that you submit to the special session: Ethical, legal and social implications of artificial intelligence

Why present at the special session

The IEEE CIS Task Force on Ethical and Social Implications of Computational Intelligence began organising a series of workshops and special sessions starting at IEEE WCCI 2018 (workshop and special session). These were followed by a special sessions at:

  • IEEE CEC 2019
  • IEEE WCCI 2020 (Glasgow)
  • Panel session at IEEE SSCI 2020 (Brisbane)
  • the IEEE Symposium on the Ethical, Social and Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence (IEEE ETHAI) at IEEE SSCI 2020 (Brisbane)
  • IEEE SSCI 2021 (Orlando)
  • IEEE SSCI 2022 (Singapore)

There is momentum in the academic, research, scientific and business communities, based on the current and forthcoming legislation proposals (eg The EU proposed Regulation Framework on AI) to understand how “do” AI ethically, at all stages in the AI lifecycle, in order to building trustworthy and transparent applications and services.

IEEE WCCI 2022 is an ideal forum to reach all  communities and discuss the principles to practice gaps.

Organiser biographies and contacts

Prof Keeley Crockett, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Keeley Crockett currently leads the Computational Intelligence Lab and Machine Intelligence theme within Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, Her main research interests include fuzzy systems, computational approaches to natural language processing, and computational intelligence for psychological profiling (comprehension and deception). She is leading work on Place based practical Artificial Intelligence, facilitating a parliamentary  inquiry conducted in 2020 with Policy Connect and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics (APGDA) in June and July 2020 as part of Metropolis funding. She has and is working on numerous projects receiving grants from the European Union H2020 Programme for novel research, the academic co-lead in the ERDF  £6m funded GM Artificial Intelligence Foundry,  to Innovate UK funding where the focus is on knowledge transfer partnerships with business.  Keeley is currently the Chair of the IEEE Women into Computational Intelligence sub-committee, Co-Chair of the IEEE WIE Educational Outreach sub-committee, IEEE UKRI SIGHT Ethics and Wellbeing officer and a member of numerous CIS subcommittees. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Keeley serves as an Associate Editor on the IEEE Trans. Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, IEEE Trans. Artificial intelligence and IEEE Trans on Fuzzy systems. She is the current Chair of the IEEE Task Force on Ethical and Social Implications of Computational Intelligence and will serve as Co-General Chair at IEEE SSCI, Orlando 2021. She is Track Chair AI and Big Data at IEEE ISC2 2021 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference – 2021 and Workshop Chair at 2021 IEEE International Humanitarian Technology Conference (IHTC 2021).

Prof Matt Garratt (Corresponding) University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia

Matthew Garratt received a BE degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Sydney University, Australia, a graduate diploma in applied computer science from Central Queensland University and a PhD in the field of biologically inspired robotics from the Australian National University in 2008. He is an Associate professor with the School of Engineering and Information Technology (SEIT) at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. Matt is currently the Deputy Head of School (Research) in SEIT and is the chair of the CIS task force on the Ethics and Social Implications of CI. His research interests include sensing, guidance and control for autonomous systems with particular emphasis on biologically inspired and CI approaches. He is a member of the IEEE CIS and robotics and automation society and also senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and member of the American Helicopter Society.

Prof Robert Reynolds, Wayne State University, USA

Robert G. Reynolds received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a professor of Computer Science and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Wayne State University. He is also an Adjunct Associate Research Scientist with the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His interests are in the development of computational models of cultural evolution for use in the simulation of complex organizations and in computer gaming applications. Prof. Reynolds produced a framework, Cultural Algorithms, which is a data intensive evolutionary search algorithm based upon principles of social and cultural evolution. He has applied this approach to solving data intensive problems and has received funding from both government and industry to support his work. He has co-authored three books and published over 250 papers on the evolution of social intelligence in journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He is currently an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He is a member of the IEEE USA Research and Development Policy Committee. Dr. Reynolds is a senior member of the IEEE.