Hallie Siegel

h-index2
2papers
41citations

2 Papers

1.2CYOct 6, 2020
Towards a Policy-as-a-Service Framework to Enable Compliant, Trustworthy AI and HRI Systems in the Wild

Alexis Morris, Hallie Siegel, Jonathan Kelly

Building trustworthy autonomous systems is challenging for many reasons beyond simply trying to engineer agents that 'always do the right thing.' There is a broader context that is often not considered within AI and HRI: that the problem of trustworthiness is inherently socio-technical and ultimately involves a broad set of complex human factors and multidimensional relationships that can arise between agents, humans, organizations, and even governments and legal institutions, each with their own understanding and definitions of trust. This complexity presents a significant barrier to the development of trustworthy AI and HRI systems---while systems developers may desire to have their systems 'always do the right thing,' they generally lack the practical tools and expertise in law, regulation, policy and ethics to ensure this outcome. In this paper, we emphasize the "fuzzy" socio-technical aspects of trustworthiness and the need for their careful consideration during both design and deployment. We hope to contribute to the discussion of trustworthy engineering in AI and HRI by i) describing the policy landscape that must be considered when addressing trustworthy computing and the need for usable trust models, ii) highlighting an opportunity for trustworthy-by-design intervention within the systems engineering process, and iii) introducing the concept of a "policy-as-a-service" (PaaS) framework that can be readily applied by AI systems engineers to address the fuzzy problem of trust during the development and (eventually) runtime process. We envision that the PaaS approach, which offloads the development of policy design parameters and maintenance of policy standards to policy experts, will enable runtime trust capabilities intelligent systems in the wild.

5.1CYSep 18, 2020
Making Sense of the Robotized Pandemic Response: A Comparison of Global and Canadian Robot Deployments and Success Factors

T. Barfoot, J. Burgner-Kahrs, E. Diller et al.

From disinfection and remote triage, to logistics and delivery, countries around the world are making use of robots to address the unique challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Robots are being used to manage the pandemic in Canada too, but relative to other regions, we have been more cautious in our adoption -- this despite the important role that robots of Canadian origin are now playing on the global stage. This white paper discusses why this is the case, and argues that strategic investment and support for the Canadian robotics industry are urgently needed to bring the benefits of robotics home, where we have more control in shaping the future of this game-changing technology. Such investments will not only serve to support Canada's current pandemic response and post pandemic recovery, but will also prepare this country to weather future crises. Without such support, Canada risks falling behind other developed nations that are investing heavily in hardware automation at this time.