Responsible Artificial Intelligence

We study the ethical and societal impact of AI, through the development of tools and methodologies design, monitor, and develop trustworthy AI systems and applications.
Our research is not only about the development of intelligent systems, but also in understanding the effects of their deployment on our societies. We are working to ensure the ethical application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), both through public engagement and frequent interaction with policymakers, and by facilitating the engineering of Responsible AI.

Our diverse multidisciplinary research programme aims to help all relevant actors to have access to the means and tools to develop, deploy, operate, and govern systems, while taking any ethical, legal, and socio-economics implications into consideration.

Research Topics & Questions

• AI Governance: Which ethical, legal, and socio-economic issues arise from the activity of autonomous intelligent agents in teams? How can activity be regulated?  What are the moral and legal values we want our systems to adhere to?
• Systems Engineering of AI: How can we develop intelligent systems with modular maintainable code? How can we efficiently develop systems that adhere to our moral and legal values?
• Analysis and formalization of social interaction: The aim is to study the effect of social and organizational structure taking into account the autonomy and heterogeneity of participants and the societal and legal values holding in the context. To this end, we are developing formal theories and a computational architecture for agent deliberation based on social-practices.
• Design and evaluation of human-agent teamwork: The central research question is how do people interact (negotiate, trust, cooperate) with autonomous cognitive entities in a social setting and the development of agent-based simulations of complex socio-technical domains.
  
  

Visiting Fellowship Program

The AI research groups at the Department of Computer Science, Umeå University, Sweden, have established a Visiting Fellowship program to foster the development of links with international scholars (at least 5 years post doctorate). This Fellowship is an exciting opportunity for scholars to visit the Department, contribute to its academic life and form new collaborations. The focus of the Fellowship is on the impact of Artificial Intelligence, in the broadest sense, a key strength and unifying feature of the AI cluster, or on a substantive area of interest within AI cluster.

Proposals for collaborative research with members of the AI cluster are especially welcome. Applicants are therefore strongly encouraged to engage on interaction with members of the cluster prior to submitting their application for visiting fellowship program. We expect to support 3 to 5 fellowships per year.

Applications for visiting fellowship are currently closed. Notifications for fellows in the Fall 2020/Winter 2021 were announced in May 2020. 
Fellows for 2020/2021 are:
• Hans Weigand, The Netherlands (postponed to 2021)
• Rui Prada, Portugal (postponed to 2021)
• Mark Klein, USA
• Hans van Dittmarsch, France
• Aurelie Clodic, France
• Catriona Kennedy, UK
• Stephen Cranefield, New Zealand