Jazon Szabo, of the 2019 cohort of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI, presented his paper on value alignment and norms at the 17th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2020) in September 2020.
An increasingly important issue in artificial intelligence is that of value alignment, in that intelligent artificial agents should behave in ways that do not violate societal or ethical values. In this context of the values of a society often being protected through norms (enforced rules), Jazon’s paper elaborated on an existing agent architecture to explore how intelligent agents can reason about the norms of a society in a value-aligned way. The paper, ‘Understanding the role of values and norms in practical reasoning,’ co-authored with Jazon’s supervisors, Dr Jose M. Such and Dr Natalia Criado was presented virtually on 15 September 2020.
The EUMAS conference series is one of the primary European forums for researchers interested in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Originally planned to be held in Thessaloniki in Greece, organised by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, EUMAS 2020 was run as a virtual conference in light of the Coronavirus pandemic.