Recent work in academia, industry, and journalism has brought widespread attention to various social and ethical issues with the use of AI in society. There are issues of fairness, privacy, security, transparency, accountability and others – all of which can lead to harmful impact across society and especially on marginalized social groups.
We are looking for a UK-national (or UK home-fee-eligible) PhD student who is eager to contribute to the area of “Responsible Robotics” – which focuses on a critical analysis of existing systems and practices in AI for robotics. The goal is to uncover social, ethical, and interaction issues of robot systems, and develop new methods that alleviate them. More concretely, the PhD will focus on one of the following topics:
1. Fairness in robot motion planning and robot vision
◦ identifying hidden values in existing motion planners, robot vision algorithms, and robotics datasets,
◦ identifying fairness concerns in robotics through user studies and critical literature/media analysis,
◦ questioning current practices in fair AI,
◦ proposing new system configurations or technical methods to alleviate issues of fairness
2. Explainable and human-in-the-loop robot motion planning
◦ modeling human expectations and human understanding of robot motion,
◦ developing new algorithms and user interfaces for explainable and human-in-the-loop planning,
◦ conducting user studies to evaluate the effectiveness of explainable/human-in-the-loop algorithms, and to characterize issues such as automation bias.
Candidates are expected to have:
- strong skills in Python/C++ programming
- strong experience using robot planning and computer vision algorithms
- strong interest in social justice, inclusivity, transparency, or activism
- [preferable] experience working with ROS and real robots
- [optional] experience in HCI or HRI methods
Starting date: Flexible between Oct 2022 ~ Oct 2023.
Application instructions: Please send an initial expression of interest to Martim Brandao: [Email Address Removed] , consisting of: 1) CV; 2) Brief explanation of why you are interested in the project and; 3) Brief explanation of why you fit each of the requirements and what makes you a great candidate.
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