Socially Intelligent Civic Infrastructure and Challenges for AI Ethics

Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University)

26 June 2024, 16:00-17:30 | room F 206 of building 22 (Applied Sciences)


Abstrat

Advances in technology are leading to a shift from traditional to smart civic infrastructure, one driven by data and seeking to optimize resource usage. I posit that this shift, though desirable, is not enough. I motivate the conception of socially intelligent civic infrastructure, one that adaptively deals with multiparty requirements, is user-centric, satisfices individual and societal objectives, and provides affordances for cooperation. In so doing, the envisioned infrastructure supports and benefits from users' social intelligence by revealing to themselves and others the externalities of their decisions and promoting prosocial attitudes (empathy) and behaviors (cooperation) between users. As envisioned, socially intelligent civic infrastructure would not only serve user needs but also shape their preferences toward societally desirable outcomes such as sustainability.

Munindar P Singh

Dr. Munindar P. Singh is the SAS Institute Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, where he is also an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor.

Munindar's research interests include artificial intelligence and multiagent systems with a focus on ethics, accountability, trust, and governance from a sociotechnical systems perspective. Current applications of interest include e-business, privacy, transportation, and humanitarian logistics.

Munindar is a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and a member (honoris causa) of Academia Europaea. He has won the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the IEEE TCSVC Research Innovation Award, and the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. He has won NC State University's Outstanding Research Achievement Award twice, was selected as an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor, and is a member of NCSU's Research Leadership Academy. He has also won NCSU's Faculty Graduate Mentor Award.

Munindar's research has been recognized with awards and sponsorship by (alphabetically) Army Research Lab, Army Research Office, Cisco Systems, Consortium for Ocean Leadership, DARPA, Department of Defense, Ericsson, Facebook, IBM, Intel, National Science Foundation, and Xerox. Thirty-three students have received PhD degrees and forty-one students MS degrees under Munindar's direction. In addition, he has advised ten postdoctoral fellows.