I am a Juniorprofessor for Explainable Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Ulm University. I am a computer scientist by training. My research interests are machine ethics, human-aware robot navigation, social robotics, and explainability of complex autonomous systems. I am one of the developers of the HERA approach to machine ethics (http://www.hera-project.com), and of Immanuel, a conversational robot that encourages people to reflect upon their own ethical views and become aware of alternative views through dialogue. My work brings together formal methods and empirical research.
Deontological ethics maintain that actions bear moral value which is notdetermined by the action’s consequences but rather by intrinsic moral value of theaction itself. Drawing on results in action theory, according to which actions arealways performed under a description, I present an integrated system that accom-plishes inferences of action descriptions from concrete action sequences as exe-cuted by a robot. Using this system, specification of deontological values becomes very flexible.
