CLOSED: Call for Papers: Special Issue on Intelligent and Autonomous Systems in Government

Publication date: March/April 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based intelligent and autonomous systems are transforming human lives in unprecedented ways. As AI technology proliferates our society, national and local governments play a key role in enabling its widespread deployment towards improving the quality of human life, as well as in developing and shaping AI policy towards the betterment of human society. Government AI projects present some unique challenges including deploying to large population scales at national and/or regional levels, ensuring fair and responsible use of the technology, guaranteeing accessibility across different economic, demographic and socio-cultural levels, and providing methods to transparently measure and report to the public metrics related to the technology’s accountability, adoption and impact. The research methods and techniques developed in academia and industry, which form the underlying technology in many government projects, are usually not designed with many of these factors in mind. They then have to be rebuilt or redesigned before being integrated in government systems and applications. This technology ‘gap’ often culminates in significant challenges such as over-budgeted government expenses, extended project timelines, and poorly designed end-products that might not align with the project goals. Our special issue aims to bridge this technology gap through articles that describe challenges, experiences, success stories and lessons learned from the planning, design, implementation, evaluation and/or deployment of AI-based government projects. We envisage that these discussions will inform researchers with best practices for developing technologies that are relevant to, and well aligned with the needs of government projects.

Topics of interest include:

• Intelligent autonomous systems and software tools for different government-related applications including; transportation and civilian infrastructure; medicine, healthcare and emergency response; defense and international peacekeeping; cyber-security; and agriculture, environment and natural resources management;
• Multi-domain and cross-cutting operations enabled by government projects across international and inter-regional boundaries
• Fair and responsible use of AI in government projects
• Sustainable and energy-aware government projects enabled through AI
• Human-machine interactions and human-centric AI design for government projects
• Legal and ethical aspects of AI in government policies

Submission Guidelines

Please visit the author information for more submission criteria. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system  and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

Questions?

Contact the lead guest editor at prithviraj.dasgupta@nrl.navy.mil.

• Dr. Prithviraj Dasgupta [LGE], US Naval Research Laboratory, USA
• Dr. Damian Marriott, (former) Defence Science and Technology Group, Adelaide, Australia
• Dr. Li Li, Defence Research and Development Canada, Ottawa, Canada
• Dr. Priya Narayanan, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA