CLOSED Call for Papers: Special Issue on Sociotechnical Perspectives on AI Ethics and Accountability

The recent resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI) and its expanding applications have led to increased interest in the challenges of ethics and accountability, along with associated concerns such as fairness, liability, and verification.

Much of the recent work on AI ethics and allied concerns takes an atomistic, single-agent perspective, such as the decision-making involved in the trolley problems, or the statistical aspects of machine-learning algorithms, such as optimizing a metric for the benefit of the decision-maker.

In contrast, this special issue will focus on system-level perspectives on AI ethics and accountability, which consider how AI is embedded in technology while respecting the needs of society. Specific settings include a human or organization using an AI algorithm to arrive at decisions that affect others, as well as AI agents assisting humans in how they interact with each other and with existing social institutions. Research on statistical and decision-making aspects of AI ethics is welcome as long as it approaches the problem from a system perspective.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Sociotechnical systems with multiple stakeholders from a computational perspective
• Models of institutions and norms
• Conceptions of human values (such as privacy, fairness, and safety)
• Ethics and accountability in organizations and business processes
• Trust and trustworthiness in groups, including organizations and loosely structured communities
• User interactions with AI agents in decision-making (such as loan application processing) and cyber-physical control (such as autonomous vehicles and manufacturing)
• Methods and tools for supporting ethics and accountability, including requirements modeling, software engineering, and information system design
• Evaluations of computational approaches for ethics and accountability, including datasets for evaluation
• Applications and empirical studies in specific domains (such as transportation or healthcare)

Important Dates

Submissions due: 21 April 2021

First-round review due: 1 June 2021

Revision due: 7 July 2021

Final decision notification: 25 July 2021

Camera-ready submission due: 30 August 2021

Publication: November/December 2021

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IEEE Internet Computing’s international readership–primarily practicing engineers and academics who are looking for material that introduces new technology and broadens familiarity with current topics. We do not accept white papers, and papers that are primarily theoretical or mathematical must clearly relate the mathematical content to a real-life or engineering application. Please read the author instructions here. To submit a manuscript, create or access an account on ScholarOne.

Guest Editors

Contact the guest editors at ic6-2021@computer.org.

• Nadin Kokciyan, University of Edinburgh
• Biplav Srivastava, University of South Carolina
• Michael N. Huhns, University of South Carolina
• Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University