Carme Torras: Robots in healthcare--Interdisciplinary co-design and technoethics education
CARME TORRAS
Carme Torras is Research Professor at the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) since 1991. With a background in mathematics and computer science, Prof. Torras has focused her research on cognitive robotics, neurocomputing, artificial interlligence, and social robotics, as well as on the socio-cultural implications of robotics. In acknowledgement of her contributions she has won numerous awards. She was research leader of several large-scale European research projects on cognitive and social robotics, and has co-authored books, 149 journal papers, and about 220 conference papers and book chapters. However, Prof. Torras also has published outside of academia: her commitment to disseminate and discuss the social implications of robotics with wide audiences has led her to write two science fiction novels and participate in eleven collective volumes, where ethical issues in technology play a key role. Her novel La mutació sentimental (Pagès Editors, 2008), winner of the Manuel de Pedrolo and Ictineu awards, has been translated into Spanish (Editorial Milenio, 2012) and into English as The Vestigial Heart (MIT Press, 2018), and published along with online materials to teach a university course on “Ethics in Social Robotics and AI”. Since 2020, she is a member of the Advisory Committee of Ethics in AI of the Catalan Government, the Ethics Committee of UPC, and Vice-President of the Ethics Committee of CSIC.
Abstract of the lecture
The experience of co-designing two assistive robot prototypes to help people with physical and mental disabilities, respectively, will be described. The first one is a small robot arm, equipped with a camera, a force sensor and an interactive tablet, for feeding people in large healthcare centres, which has been developed by several engineers and a social scientist in our research group, together with the managing team, physicians, nurses, innovation technicians and sixty voluntary patients in the Sociosanitary Park Pere Virgili in Barcelona. The second prototype has been co-designed with a neurologist, a therapist and a social worker to provide cognitive training to the patients in a day-care facility of the ACE Alzheimer Centre in Barcelona. Among the lessons learned, the importance of interdisciplinarity, human-centric deployment, personalization, and technoethics training stand out. Materials to teach a course on ‘Ethics of Social Robotics and AI’ and to foster debate, by exploiting the engaging appeal of science fiction narrative, will be presented. While social robotics shares several ethics issues with AI, embodiment makes a huge difference in other aspects, some beneficial and some riskier.
Plenary dialogue
Professor Torras will deliver her lecture remotely and then engage in a live dialogue with two interlocutors before addressing questions from the audience.
Interlocutor 2: Bertram Malle, Brown University, USA
Bertram F. Malle earned his Master’s degrees in philosophy/linguistics (1987) and psychology (1989) at the University of Graz, Austria. After coming to the United States in 1990 he received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1995 and joined the University of Oregon Psychology Department. Since 2008 he is Professor at the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and he is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s research has been funded by the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and DARPA. He has distributed his work in 130 articles and several books, on the topics of social cognition (intentionality, mental state inferences, behavior explanations), moral psychology (cognitive and social blame, guilt, norms), and human-robot interaction (moral competence in robots, socially assistive robotics).