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Accepted workshops will be available in April 2016.
Accepted workshops in 2014 is available (Accepted workshops in 2014).
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List of workshops
- Tenth International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2016)
- The 2nd international workshop Healthy Aging Tech Mashup service, data and people (HAT-MASH 2016)
- Skill Sciences
- Scientific Document Analysis (SCIDOCA 2016)
- Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 13 (LENLS 13)
- Artificial Intelligence of and for Business (AI-Biz 2016)
- The Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of Robots in Therapy and Education (ELS-JSAI)
- Workshop Program
| Nov.14 | Nov.15 | Nov.16 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gallery space | Plenary talk | ||
| Symposium space | LENLS | LENLS | |
| Meeting room(large-1) | HAT-MASH | HAT-MASH | |
| Meeting room(large-2) | AI-Biz | SCIDOCA | SCIDOCA |
| Meeting room(middle) | JURISIN | JURISIN | Skill Sciences |
| Meeting room(small) | ELS |
The seventh JSAI International Symposia on AI (JSAI-isAI 2016) will take place at Raiosha in Hiyoshi Campus of Keio University, Yokohama, Kanazawa.
- Plenary talk 13:00-14:00, Nov.14 (Gallery space)
Speakers: Prof. Fernando Koch
ACM Distinguished Speaker
Invited Professor at Korea University, Graduate School of Management of Technology
Honorary Senior Fellow, The University of Melbourne
http://www.fernandokoch.me/
Title: Disruptive Technologies and the Future of Society
Topics: Artificial Language/Machine Learning,Computers and Society,Emerging Technologies,Science & Computing
Abstract:
The new generation of technology development — including Computational intelligence, Cognitive Computing, Internet of Things, Social Computing and Virtual Reality, and others – will disrupt the economic and social model of every human endeavor. Advances in these domains are inevitable, irreversible, and their impact is immeasurable. The questions are: how to promote strategies to embrace, commercialize, and monetize these new technologies? How to prepare business and society to this new technology revolution? And, how to position current business to be part of this evolution reaping the benefits of disruptive technologies?
- Workshop 1 : Tenth International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2016)
Juris-informatics is a new research area which studies legal issues from the perspective of informatics. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss both the fundamental and practical issues among people from the various backgrounds such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic and philosophy, including the conventional “AI and law” area. We solicit unpublished papers on theories, technologies and applications on juris-informatics.
Organizers:
Workshop Chair:
Makoto Nakamura, Nagoya University
Seiichiro Sakurai, Meiji Gakuin University
Katsuhiko Toyama, Nagoya University
Steering Committee:
Takehiko Kasahara, Toin Yokohama University
Makoto Nakamura, Nagoya University
Katsumi Nitta, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Seiichiro Sakurai, Meiji Gakuin University
Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai
Satoshi Tojo, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(JAIST)
Katsuhiko Toyama, Nagoya University
Website:
http://www.kl.i.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp/jurisin2016/
Report:
The Tenth International Workshop on Juris-Informatics (JURISIN 2016) was held with a support of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI) in association with JSAI International Symposia on AI (JSAI-isAI 2016). Although JURISIN has been organized to discuss legal issues from the perspective of informatics, the scope of JURISIN is more wide-ranging than that of the conventional AI and law. Thus, the members of Program Committee (PC) are leading researchers in various fields. The collaborative work of computer scientists, lawyers and philosophers is expected to contribute to the advancement of juris-informatics and it is also expected to open novel research areas.
Despite the short announcement period, eighteen papers were submitted. Each paper was reviewed by three or more members of PC. This year, we allowed a double submission to JURIX 2016. As a result, one paper was withdrawn because of acceptance to JURIX 2016 and fifteen papers were accepted in total. The collection of papers covers various topics such as legal reasoning, argumentation theory, legal compliance, dispute resolution, application of AI and informatics to law, application of natural language processing and so on. As invited speakers, we had Professor Doctor Georg Borges from Saarland University, Germany and Professor Harumichi Yuasa from Institute of Information Security, Japan. Moreover, we had a plenary talk by Professor Fernando Koch, ACM Distinguished Speaker, Invited Professor at Korea University, and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. We had a total of 37 participants, who engaged in a lively discussion.
Following the previous years, JURISIN had a session on the third Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE 2016) which consisted of a result report of the competition and eight papers for each participant.
The list of presentations is as follows:
1. (Invited Talk) Electronic Person – rights for robot: Georg Borges (Saarland University, Germany)
2. A Formal Analysis of Legal Reasoning: Yasuo Nakayama
3. A Framework to Reason about the Legal Compliance of Security Standards: Cesare Bartolini, Andra Giurgiu, Lenzini Gabriele and Livio Robaldo
4. (Plenary Talk) Artificial Language/Machine Learning,Computers and Society,Emerging Technologies,Science & Computing: Fernando Koch (Korea University, Korea; The University of Melbourne, Australia)
5. A Method to Estimate Document Structure from Unstructured Documents: Yoichi Hatsutori, Katsumasa Yoshikawa and Haruki Imai
6. Voluntary Manslaughter? Intention-to-Kill in Meta-Argumentation with Supports: Ryuta Arisaka and Ken Satoh
7. Modeling Attempt Crime in Criminal Law: Jiraporn Pooksook, Phan Minh Dung and Ken Satoh
8. Argument-based Logic Programming for Analogical Reasoning: Teeradaj Racharak, Satoshi Tojo, Nguyen Duy Hung and Prachya Boonkwan
9. Dischargeable Obligations in ALP: A case study from the Japanese Civil Code: Marco Alberti, Marco Gavanelli, Evelina Lamma, Fabrizio Riguzzi and Riccardo Zese
10. (Invited Talk) Technological Development and Japanese Law regarding Artificial Intelligence: Harumichi Yuasa (Institute of Information Security, Japan)
11. (COLIEE Session) COLIEE-2016: Evaluation of the Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment: Mi-Young Kim, Randy Goebel, Yoshinobu Kano and Ken Satoh
12. An Approach to Information Retrieval and Question Answering in the Legal Domain: Kolawole John Adebayo, Luigi Di Caro, Guido Boella and Cesare Bartolini
13. Legal Question Answering Using Paraphrasing and Entailment Analysis: Mi-Young Kim, Ying Xu, Yao Lu and Randy Goebel
14. Legal Question Answering using Ranking SVM and Deep Convolutional Neural Network: Phong-Khac Do, Huy-Tien Nguyen, Chien-Xuan Tran, Minh-Tien Nguyen and Nguyen Le Minh
15. Legal Yes/No Question Answering System using Case-Role Analysis: Ryosuke Taniguchi and Yoshinobu Kano
16. An Ensemble Based Legal Information Retrieval and Entailment System: Kiyoun Kim, Seongwan Heo, Sungchul Jung, Kihyun Hong and Young-Yik Rhim
17. Legal Information Extraction/Entailment Using SVM-Ranking and Tree-based Convolutional Neural Network: Truong-Son Nguyen, Viet-Anh Phan, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Hai-Long Trieu, Ngoc-Phuong Chau, Trung-Tin Pham and Nguyen Le Minh
18. Lexical to Discourse-level Corpus Modeling for Legal Question Answering: Danilo Carvalho, Vu Tran, Khanh Tran, Viet Lai and Nguyen Le Minh
19. Civil Code Article Information Retrieval System based on Legal Terminology and Civil Code Article Structure: Daiki Onodera and Masaharu Yoshioka
The next COLIEE will be held as an international workshop in conjunction with ICAIL (International Conference on AI and Law) in 2017. Through the activity of the workshop, we will attempt to expand a network of juris-informatics.
JURISIN2016 Chairs
Makoto Nakamura, Nagoya University
Seiichiro Sakurai, Meiji Gakuin University
Katsuhiko Toyama, Nagoya University
Photos:
1. Invited Talk by Prof. Borges
2. Invited Talk by Prof. Yuasa
3. Banquet
- Workshop 2 : The 2nd international workshop Healthy Aging Tech Mashup service, data and people (HAT-MASH 2016)
Ageing of the population cause not only substantial increase of GDP spent on elderly care per year but also societal effects, which impacts not just the health sector. Meanwhile to develop a sustainable social system, the global society envisions a transformation from reactive care to proactive care and to continuous monitoring of wellbeing and maintenance. To support this trend, we need transdisciplinary approaches and take into account demographic change, changes in the global economy and the development of new technologies.
The main objective of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss important research questions and practical challenges in healthy aging and elderly care support to promote transdisciplinary approaches. The workshop welcomes researchers, academicians as well as industrial professionals of different but relevant fields from all over the world to present their research results and development activities. The workshop provides opportunities for the participants to exchange new ideas and experiences face to face, to establish research or business network and to find global partners for future collaboration.
This is the 2nd HAT-MASH following HAT-MASH2015 which was successfully held on the 16th and 17th of November, 2015 as part of JSAI-isAI 2015, supported by the Society for Serviceology and JST.
Organizers:
Ken Fukuda, AIRC, AIST
Takuichi Nishimura, AIRC, AIST
Program committee members (tetative):
Kentaro Watanabe, AIST
Hiroyasu Miwa, AIST
Satoshi Nishimura, AIST
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/hatmash2016/home
Report:
HAT-MASH 2016 (Healthy Aging Tech mashup service, data and people) was held successfully on the 14th and 15th of November, 2016 as part of the JSAI-isAI workshop series. It was the second international workshop that bridges healthy aging and elderly care technology, information technology and service engineering.
We had three keynote lectures, 12 presentations including 3 from elderly facilities. 23 attendees were from academia, private sectors.
We would like to thank again to Prof. Mihoko Ohtake (Chiba University, Japan) for her presentation titled “Detection of Cognitive Impairment and Enhancement Technology Utilizing Conversation Data of Older Adults” and Prof. Pertti Saariluoma (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) for his presentation titled “Designing for Life” and Dr. Jaana Leikas (VTT, Finland) for her presentation titled “Ageing and Technology: Design Goals and Ethical Discussion”.
- Workshop 3 : Skill Sciences
Human skills involve well-attuned perception and fine motor control, often accompanied by thoughtful planning. The involvement of body, environment, and tools mediating them makes the study of skills unique among researches of human intelligence. The symposium invites researchers who investigate human skills and provides them with a place for exchange and discussion. The study of skills requires various disciplines to collaborate with each other because the value of skills is not determined solely in terms of efficiency, but calls for consideration of quality. Quality resides in person and often needs to be transferred through apprentice systems. The procedure of validation is strict, but more complex than scientific activities, where everything needs to be
described by referring to data. We are keen to discussing the theoretical foundations of skill science as well as practical and engineering issues in the study.
Organizers:
Tsutomu Fujinami, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Program committee (tetative):
Masaki Suwa, Keio University
Ken Hashizume, Osaka University
Mihoko Otake, Chiba University
Yoshifusa Matsuura, Yokohama National University
Keisuke Okuno, Riken
Mizue Kayama, Shinshu University
Website: http://www.jaist.ac.jp/ks/skl/activity/pg118.html
- Workshop 4 : Scientific Document Analysis (SCIDOCA 2016)
Report:
The Third International Workshop on Skill Science was held on
16th November 2016, where five lectures and eight interactive
presentations were given. We invited Prof. Randy
Goebel (Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta)
to give us a keynote lecture. About thirty people took part in
the workshop.
The special interest group of Skill Science has been active for
more than ten years. The first international meeting was
organized in 2007 and the second one was organized last year
after almost ten years’ break. This year’s meeting is the third
one without break. We aimed to internationalize the research on
skills through organizing the meeting and I believe that we have
achieved our goal as we saw more people who speak English than
last year.
The topics covered in the meeting hint well how rich our targets
of research can be. We talked about sports, conversation, tea
ceremony, etc. We also touched topics closely related to our life
such as care-giving or immovable property. The interactive
presentations functioned as a place to invite students who speak
English better than Japanese, which is important given the trend
that we receive more students from overseas than before. The
meeting seems overall to have attracted younger generations,
which is favorable in changing generations comprising the group.
Prof. Randy Goebel stimulated us with insights obtained from his
specialty, machine learning, referring to works by one of his
colleagues, Patrick Pilarski. Our effort to increase the number
of articles written in English might have enabled other
researchers in neighboring domains to investigate the target from
different perspectives than ours.
We are grateful to people who managed the international symposia
as we could organize our meeting easily despite the fact that we
had a long break since the first international meeting held in
year of 2007. We are organizing the fourth meeting in 2017,
too. We hope that our meeting will evolve to a place where
everyone can present and discuss topics related to Skill Science
without being bothered by the language barrier.
Recent proliferation of scientific papers and technical documents has become an obstacle to efficient information acquisition of new information in various fields. It is almost impossible for individual researchers to check and read all related documents. Even retrieving relevant documents is becoming harder and harder. This workshop gathers all the researchers and experts who are aiming at scientific document analysis from various perspectives, and invite technical paper presentations and system demonstrations that cover any aspects including but not limited to: Text analysis, document structure analysis, figure and table analysis, and citation analysis of scientific and technical documents, scientific information assimilation, summarization and visualization, knowledge discovery/mining from scientific papers and data, and document understanding in general.
Organizers:
Workshop Chair:
Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Co-chair:
Hiroshi Noji, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Program committee (tetative):
Yuji Matsumoto, NAIST
Hiroshi Noji, NAIST
Hiroyuki Shindo, NAIST
Ken Sato, NII
Centro Inui, Tohoku University
Nagoya Inoue, Tohoku University
Akin Aizawa, NII
Yusuke Miyao, NII
Takeshi Abekawa, NII
Hidetsugu Nanba, Hiroshima City University
Yoshimasa Tsuruoka, University of Tokyo
Junichiro Mori, University of Tokyo
Yoshinobu Kano, Shizuoka University
Website: http://research.nii.ac.jp/~ksatoh/scidoca2016/
Report:
We held SCIDOCA 2016 (First International Workshop on SCIentific DOCument Analysis) in JSAI-isAI. In several research areas such as biology and material science, the number of published papers per day is rapidly increasing and there is a growing demand for analyzing the structure of papers automatically. To discuss the research progress on this area, we called for papers on natural language processing and information retrieval focusing on scientific documents.
This year we were delayed to announce the CFP; to collect papers, we decided to call for short paper track, which accepts papers up to 4 pages (up to 6 pages at final submission), in addition to the ordinary long paper track. After reviewing, we were able to accept one long paper, and 13 short papers.
The workshop was in two days, 15-16 November. We were grateful to have a distinguished invited speaker for each day, two in total. The first speaker was Jin-Dong Kim at Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) and he presented recent advances in annotation on scientific literatures. The second speaker was Randy Goebel at University of Alberta, and talked about challenges on information extraction from big data.
This workshop was related to our research project of JST CREST on scientific document analysis launched in the last year, and our aim was to facilitate communication between relevant researchers. Though unfortunately this year we didn’t have much time for CFP and we couldn’t gather many oversea researchers, we would like to extend the workshop in future based on this experience to make this works a great community for relevant researchers.
Hiroshi Noji and Yuji Matsumoto
SCIDOCA 2016 Program Committee C-Chairs
- Workshop 5 : Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 13 (LENLS 13)
LENLS is an annual international workshop on formal syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We invite submissions on topics in formal syntax, model-theoretic and/or proof-theoretic semantics, computational semantics, game-theoretic/bayesian approaches to pragmatics, non-classical logic and its relation to natural language, and formal philosophy of language.
Organizers:
Daisuke Bekki, Ochanomizu University/National Institute of Informatics
Koji Mineshima, Ochanomizu University
Program committee (tetative):
Alastair Butler
Daisuke Bekki
Eric McCready
Koji Mineshima
Yoshiki Mori
Yasuo Nakayama
Katsuhiko Sano
Katsuhiko Yabushita
Tomoyuki Yamada
Shunsuke Yatabe
Kei Yoshimoto
Website: http://www.is.ocha.ac.jp/~bekki/lenls/
Report:
On November 13-15, 2016, the Thirteenth International Workshop of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS 13) took place. As an annual international workshop recognised internationally in the formal syntax-semantics-pragmatics community, LENLS has, since 2005, been bringing together for discussion and interdisciplinary communication researchers working on formal theories of natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics, (formal) philosophy, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
On November 13th the workshop was located at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tachikawa, and on subsequent days moved to the Raiousha Building, Keio University, as a workshop of the Eighth JSAI International Symposia on AI (JSAI-isAI 2011), organised by The Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI).
The first day of LENLS 13 comprised an “Unshared Task” that asked participants to make use of datasets (FraCaS, MultiFraCaS and JSeM) as benchmarks for measuring and comparing the competence of syntax/semantic theories and computational processing systems. Submissions for the remaining days of LENLS came from topics in formal syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and related fields.
The first day had three twenty minute talks, three thirty minute talks, as well as three invited lectures that were each one hour in length. The invited speakers on this day were Robin Cooper (University of Gothenburg), who spoke about testing the FraCaS test suite, Tim O’Gorman (University of Colorado Boulder), who spoke about Abstract Meaning Representation performance on the Fracas test Suite, and Masaaki Nagata (NTT Communication Science Laboratories) who talked about how semantics can contribute to neural machine translation.
The following two days of LENLS 13 had fifteen submitted talks with the duration of thirty minutes each, and two invited lectures that were each one hour in length. Topics discussed by the submitted papers raised issues from Dynamic Semantics, Expressive meanings, Type Theoretic Semantics, language generation, syntactic analysis as well as fundamental themes from the philosophy of language. The invited speakers were Youichi Matsusaka (Tokyo Metropolitan University), who talked about a Metasemantic study of reference and pattern recognition, and again Robin Cooper (University of Gothenburg), who spoke about proper names in interaction.
For workshop participants a proceedings volume was made available containing 17 papers and 9 abstracts (five of which were for the invited talks). In addition a selection of papers from the workshop are to be published as a portion of a volume “JSAI-isAI2016 selected papers”, which will be published in the `Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence’ series (Springer Verlag).
Chair: Alastair Butler (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics)
Co-chair: Koji Mineshima (Ochanomizu University/JST CREST), Daisuke Bekki (Ochanomizu University/JST CREST/AIST AIRC/NII), and Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)
- Workshop 6 : Artificial Intelligence of and for Business (AI-Biz 2016)
- The objective of this workshop is to foster the concepts and techniques of“Business Intelligence (BI).” in Artificial Intelligence. BI should include such cutting-edge techniques as data science, agent-based modelling, complex adaptive systems, and IoT. The application areas include but not limited to business management, finance engineering, service sciences, manufacturing engineering, and so on.
The basic idea of BI would enhance the capabilities of conventional techniques in business domain, however, so far, we have not discussed BI concepts deeply in artificial intelligence literature. We would like to focus on BI topics to the issues of firms and organizations for getting more benefits on interactions with human- and computer- mixed systems.
The main purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss important research questions and practical challenges in Business Intelligence, Business Informatics, Data Analysis and Agent-based Modelling to exchange latest results, to join efforts in solving the common challenges. It is also to establish an effective communication between researchers and developers involved in the both areas. The workshop will provide opportunities for the participants to exchange new ideas and experiences to establish research or business network and to find global partners for future collaboration.
Organizers:
Workshop Chair:
Takao Terano, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Hiroshi Takahashi, Keio University
Setsuya Kurahashi, University of Tsukuba
Steering Committee Members:
Hiroshi Deguchi, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Manage Ichikawa, National Institute of Public Health
Hajime Kita, Kyoto University
Keiki Takadama, The University of Electro-Communications
Shinzo Takahashi, Waseda University
Takashi Yamada, Yamaguchi University
Website:
http://sig-bi.jp/ai-biz2016.html
- Workshop 7 : The Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of Robots in Therapy and Education (ELS-JSAI)
Survey Website:
Would you please contribute a survey to ELS-JSAI?
The survey will take about 15 min to be completed and your answers will be very important for future work on these subjects.
https://bino.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9n9DUjD9Ex5bpbv
Our aim is to conduct parallel research between Europe and Japan on the ethical, legal and social (ELS) issues concerning the adoption of social robots in the contexts of therapy and education.
The twinned workshop has multiple objectives:
- Collect all the ELS concerns, problems and difficulties concerning this type of technology – focusing on ethics, privacy and liability
- Enable discussions on the ELS aspects on an interdisciplinary and multicultural scale
- Provide a comprehensive roadmap for solving these issues
This twinned workshop brings together researchers from different disciplines, backgrounds and cultures to provide interdisciplinary insights into the current legal and ethical discussions about the impact of robots on society. This will serve to gather different scenarios on the topic. It will deepen our understanding of the real concerns and problems that researchers, teachers, therapists, and legal scholars are currently facing. It will also ensure an appropriate balance between innovation and user rights.
Organizers:
Eduard Fosch Villaronga, Science and Technology Erasmus Mundus Programme
Aurelia Tamò, University of Zurich
Christoph Lutz, BI Norwegian Business School and the University of Leipzig
Website:
https://legalaspectsofsocialrobots.wordpress.com/
Report:
Summary
The Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Social Robots
in Healthcare and Education Workshop (also called
ELS Workshop) was held in Yokohama the 14th Nov
2016 during the JSAI-isAI Conference. The workshop
was twinned with another workshop in the New
Friends Conference in Barcelona the 2nd Nov 2016.
The workshop aimed at addressing the concerns that
the use of social robots in therapy end education pose
in the legal, ethical and societal (ELS) domain in a
constructive and proactive manner. It took up
important ELS challenges that come with the
introduction of robots in therapy and education
through very simple cases. A booklet available to
anyone was created in order to ease the discussions
and can be found here.
The ELS Workshop first, it dealt with aspects of
human dignity and the questions of whether and how
social robots could endanger an individual’s dignity, for
example, by implying an overly simplistic model of
human agency or by discriminating against certain
population groups. Second, the workshop revolved
around the topic of privacy. Third, the topic of liability
was addressed.
The three overarching ELS issues – dignity, privacy,
and liability – were discussed in an open discussion
workshop format. The workshop laid the focus on defining the benefits, conflicts, and possible solutions
to the conflicts that such new technologies pose.
Researchers from all disciplines as well as
practitioners actively engaged in the discussions. In
particular those participants who submitted an
abstract for the workshop.
Main findings
Here there are the main findings of what the ELS
Workshop discussed about: a) challenges and issues of
social robots in therapy and education; b) addressing
the challenges / finding solutions. A list of recurrent
topics has been also added in c); as well as a list of
future steps that the researchers that attended the
workshop compromised to carry out. The following
comments are not attributed to particular individuals
and are clustered by relevant thematic topics.
a) Challenges and issues of social robots in therapy
and education
•Public participation: Users are not taken into account
into the design process of the robot and that is why the
“user-centered” is, at the current stage, not a true
statement.
•Public awareness: Connected with the user-centered
idea, citizens opinion is neither taken into account
during the policy-making process. At the same time,
however, it seems that people do not read the
government website and are not very engaged with the
government. Some participants mentioned that in
Korea individual privacy is not perceived to have much
value and that the Government does not promote
public awareness concerning it.
•Public Security: It was explained in the workshop
that in Korea there are lots of security issues in the
country, and a case concerning a data leak was
explained. If robots will be spread in the market, it will
be crucial to address all the security issues, especially
if elderly and disabled people are involved.
•Privacy Post-Mortem: third uses of data is a very
important issue, especially when it comes to privacy
post mortem. Should the informed consent involve
privacy after the death of the person?
•Legal management: The case of the Henna Hotel was
introduced as an example of how robotic technology is
already in the market. While the industry has already
taken steps towards the introduction of robotic
technology to the market, there has been no legal
accompaniment, especially in the case of educational
and therapeutic robots.
•Standards: Due to the lack of this legal management,
it is not very clear what standards apply to educational
and therapeutic robots. They simply do not exist in the
industry.
•Legal uncertainty: Unless there is a problem, it seems
that the Law is not providing any pro-active measure
towards how to ensure a correct design/use of robot
technology.
• Immigrant discrimination: Japan is investing in
robotic technology instead of hiring foreigners due to
language difficulties as well as cultural differences.
Elderly prefer to be treated by Japanese caregivers or
by robot technology rather than by immigrants.
• Employment of robot technology: The immigrant
discriminatory scenario is aggravated by the low
wages Japanese caregivers receive.
•Dehumanizing practice: In Japan, it is normally the
daughter or the daughter-in-law that takes care of the
mother/grandmother. Dehumanizing the practice of
care could bring more free time to the caregiver (that
is in this case a relative) but could bring about the
decrease of human-human interaction from the care
receiver side.
• Multiple Legislations: There is an urgent need to
address the ELS issues if this robotic technology is
going to be shipped all over the world. Compliance
with each national legislation will bring about many
conflicts that challenge the insertion of these robots to
the market.
• Multiple Robots: Each robot is different and the
context where they are inserted too. Therefore, it is
difficult to standardize case-by-case scenarios.
• Substitution of humans: Some of the participants
wondered why humans need to surrender to the robot
taking-over scenario and who is in charge of deciding
this. This brought about the following issue:
technology is not people-driven.
•Robot obligations: If academia is talking about the
possibility to provide robot rights, this highlights the
importance of receiving also obligations.
•Unexpected consequences: Some of the robots that
are entering to the market have not been tested in real
contexts and unexpected consequences can easily be
encountered.
•Agency: connected with the unexpected consequences,
it is not very clear whether the agency comes from the
context or if the agency comes from the designers. Who
is entitled to decide the agency of their robot?
• New Agency: The literature has been comparing robots to animals, corporations and other things…
should the robot be considered a new agent?
•Religion: Agency is perceived differently depending
on the religion. Some comments on how inanimate
things have spirit were highlighted, as well as how
Hinduism also welcomes low-agency objects to be
important, e.g. a book cannot be touched by the feet.
What it is not clear is whether it is a religion problem
or an individual problem.
•Human Behavior: An experiment in Japan found as a
result that children can beat a robot in a mall. This
experiment was explained in the workshop in order to
avoid the replica of the behavior in the human-human
interaction.
•Education: Not a lot of schools have access to robotic
technology, although it seems to be important to
educate the population on the correct use of robotic
technology.
•New law: do robots challenge the legal system in a
different manner other agents do?
b) Addressing the Challenges / Finding Solutions
•Legal certainty: it is important to have knowledge
about domestic laws. A concept similar to “regulatory
by design” should be implemented.
• Regulatory prohibition: Depending on the use of
robots we should ban the producing of robots to avoid
unfortunate scenarios. The majority agreed that
military robots should be banned.
• Data prohibition: Connected with the regulatory
prohibition, the processing of the data out of the main
purpose of the robot should be prohibited. This
includes a revision of the general statements that
companies normally do in order to collect as much data
as possible.
•Public participation: the creation of a random jury as
we have in the legal system could help on the
participation of the general public on the decision-
making process, as well as on the design of the robot
technology. Some information and materials could be
given to the citizens and they could provide their
feedback.
•Employment of technology: increasing the salary of
the workers could make the caregiver profession more
attractive and increase efficiency as other companies
have experienced. Working less hours can also
increase efficiency although it is not clear how it could
be modeled with care professions.
•Unexpected consequences: If we could predict and
model an agent’s behavior then we could avoid
unexpected consequences. Building robot strategies
within the robot itself could also be of help.
•Education: it seems very difficult to know how to
teach creativity in Japan where the system is based on
memorization. Helping at this could help the
acceptance of robotic technology as well as could
promote the active participation on the design process
of the robots.
•Transparency: The robot should be able to show or
explain how is using the personal data to promote
transparency and user awareness. The use of black
boxes could provide more information on the robot
usage. It is not clear, however, until what extent the
government should have access to it.
•Regulated-by-Design: This hybrid regulatory model
should be embedded into the system to avoid any
violations with domestic and international laws.
•Pro-activity: The system of Tokku in Japan should be
spread all over the world in order to have Testing
Zones for regulatory purposes.
•Regulatory model: we need a hybrid model that can
cope with robotic technologies as well as with other
technologies, as the delivery of legal counseling is
changing rapidly: from having divorce apps to chatbots
that deal with parking tickets.
•Regulatory model: connected to this idea, each project
that involve robotic technology could be designed in a
way that knowledge can be extracted from it for policy
purposes.
•Case-by-case: the regulatory model should be done in
a way that can cope with the particular needs of every
robot and every context where this is inserted, as not
all the robots possess the same degree of intelligence
or the same capabilities.
•Robotic Agency: the creation of an agency that deals
with robots as it occurs in Japan could help having
better management of all the ELS issues.
•Open international discussions: there is the need to
open the debate to more people and to more countries.
• Replacing humans: robots should be conceived as
helpers of the humans not a replacement of them.
•Clarity on the capabilities classification could bring
about intelligibility on what is/should be permitted
and what should not.
•This clarity relates also to the vision and expectations
of the different countries on robotic technology, e.g.
international future robotic trends.
• Decision-making of the robot: in the case of an
accident, everyone could be assigned different values/importance in order the robot to choose the best
target. This could raise discrimination issues at the
same time.
•Harmonization: There is the need to harmonize what
impact means, what is risk, and what are the legal
issues concerning this type of robotic technology. There
is also the need to have a common understanding.
•Alternative solutions: if the technology allows, the
robot should be privacy friendly using other
technologies, e.g. removing the cameras in the case of
drones; or using vibrations of the floor to know that the
patient has fallen.
•Privacy: a system similar to the noise that cameras in
Korea make when they take a picture could be adopted
in order to spread awareness among the users. The
problem with this solution is that there are available
apps that allow users to take a picture without making
noise.
•Ethics could be addressed by common sense rules,
although common sense varies between countries and
individuals.
•The creation of a data bank for scientific innovations
could help avoiding the non authorized uses of data.
• An international expert committee could be
created to draft group reports
c) Main Issues (Recurring Topics)
•Regulatory model: There are no clear rules on the use
of robotic technology in therapy and education. Law is
not pragmatic.
•All the parties want to avoid responsibility of harm
occurrence
•Growing need of the importance of ELS issues when
the human-robot interaction involves vulnerable parts
of the society.
• Solutions: each solution can bring about negative
consequences. Therefore, an analysis of all the pros
and cons will have to be made in order to mitigate any
risk posed by the solutions
•The future of work (involving the promotions of co-
working spaces)
•Third uses of data (involving privacy post mortem)
•The need for an international set of rules and basic
principles.
•Robots will change the way how we conceive this
world.
d) Future Steps
•The legal system needs to
be disrupted
be pro-active
be dynamic
be more accessible
•There is the need to run more ELS workshops in
different countries with different target participants:
industry, laymen, legal scholars, etc.
•A great effort has to be done in order to change how
people learn as everything is converging in this world.
The term people in this case involves any person from
any age.
•There is the need to share the knowledge on robotic
technology among legal scholars.
• A clear classification on the capabilities of robots
(educational, therapeutic) could be of help.
•There is the need to speak with main organizations,
e.g. WTO, about this topic.
•We do need an international legal framework that can
cope with all these ELS issues in the use of robotic
technology, especially if they work with vulnerable
parts of the society.
• There should be placed the idea that robotic
technology are a supplement of the human’s work
Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects of Social Robots in
Therapy and Education Workshop Report Workshop
organized by: Eduard Fosch, Christoph Lutz and
Aurelia Tamò