[agents] CfP: Topical Collection on Trustworthy Adaptive and Learning Agents in the AI and Ethics journal

[Patrick Mannion]

***** Apologies if you receive more than one copy *****

https://www.springer.com/journal/43681/updates/19318686

As autonomous agent-based systems become ever more prevalent in everyday
life, it is imperative that society can trust that such systems will act
for the benefit of humanity. Ensuring trustworthiness for autonomous
systems is one of the key global challenges facing society at present, as
evidenced by recently published guidelines on the topic by organisations
such as the European Commission
<https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai>
, the IEEE
<https://standards.ieee.org/industry-connections/ec/autonomous-systems.html>,
and the OECD <https://www.oecd.org/going-digital/ai/principles/>.
Trustworthiness has a number of different dimensions, including
explainability, safety, fairness, accountability and compliance with
legislative and ethical standards.

Autonomous agents operating in the real world should therefore make
decisions in a fair and transparent manner that respects ethical
principles, should be aware of their social environment and should comply
with applicable regulations. This can prove challenging given the
complexity of agent architectures and the long-term dynamics — often hard
to anticipate and control — resulting from multiple agents learning and
adapting to each other and to constantly changing environments.
Furthermore, the majority of published research on autonomous agents does
not explicitly consider the level of trustworthiness of the proposed
approaches, leaving a vast gap in the literature between the theory and
practical application of agent-based systems.

Learning and adaptation are key capabilities for autonomous systems. This
topical collection (TC) in the AI and Ethics
<https://www.springer.com/journal/43681> (AI&E) journal focuses on the
topic of Trustworthy Adaptive and Learning Agents (TALA). AI&E is a new
journal recently launched by Springer, and seeks to promote informed debate
and discussion of the ethical, regulatory, and policy implications that
arise from the development of AI. The TALA TC targets high-quality original
papers covering all aspects of trustworthiness in agent-based systems,
including, but not limited to, the list of topics below. Manuscripts that
extend a previous conference or workshop publication are welcome, provided
that there is a significant amount of new material in the submission (i.e.,
the manuscript should contain at least 30% new material).

This topical collection is associated with the long-running and successful
series of workshops on Adaptive and Learning Agents
<https://ala2021.vub.ac.be/> (ALA), that have been held each year since
2009 in conjunction with the AAMAS conference. Therefore, manuscripts
reporting extended versions of work presented at a prior edition of the ALA
workshop are very much welcome. The TALA TC has an open call for papers; it
is not necessary to submit preliminary work to the ALA workshop in order to
have your manuscript considered for publication in this TC.

Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics that we would like to
cover in the topical collection:

   -

   Trustworthy algorithms for ALA, including those based on reinforcement
   learning and planning
   -

   Principled approaches to reward design for trustworthy ALA
   -

   Trustworthy multi-agent decision making
   -

   Requirements and design principles for trustworthy ALA
   -

   Benchmark problems for verifying trustworthiness of ALA
   -

   Multi-objective decision making approaches to TALA
   -

   Analyses of TALA from different ethical paradigms (such as
   utilitarianism, deontology, particularism, etc.).
   -

   Handling (environmental epistemic and aleatoric) uncertainty in TALA
   -

   Safe reinforcement learning
   -

   Explainable (learning) agents
   -

   Avoidance of bias in ALA
   -

   Emergence of coordination among adaptive and learning agents towards
   societal and environmental well-being
   -

   Long-term trustworthiness in dynamic environments composed of learning
   agents
   -

   Game theoretic approaches to frame ethical dilemmas in multiagent systems
   -

   Agent-based approaches to model the societal impacts of AI
   -

   Compliance of ALA with regulations, ethics and/or social norms
   -

   Methods to counter malicious effects of autonomous agents (e.g.,
   preventing misinformation through bots on social media)
   -

   Perspectives on cultural differences in accepting and trusting
   autonomous learning agents
   -

   Approaches to audit the behavior and impact of ALA, including agent
   failures


Timeline

There is no specific submission deadline for this TC. Manuscript
submissions will be considered for publication in the TALA TC on a
continuous basis until a sufficient number of manuscripts have been
accepted for publication. Manuscripts will be sent out for review as soon
as they are received, and first decisions on manuscripts can be expected
within 2 months approx. from the initial submission date. Submissions
accepted for publication before the completion of the topical collection
will be published online on the journal website shortly after acceptance.
Authors considering submitting to the TALA TC should contact the Guest
Editors in advance, to ensure that their proposed manuscript is in scope,
and that there is space in the TC for the manuscript.

Article types

This TC solicits original research articles, reviews/surveys, and opinion
pieces/commentaries relating to trustworthiness in agent-based systems,
including those that employ learning and/or adaptation. Research articles
should present original and high-quality theoretical and/or empirical
results that advance the field of Trustworthy Adaptive and Learning Agents.
It is expected that original research articles include (as appropriate)
full Introduction, Background, Related Work, Methods, Results, and
Discussion sections. Reviews/surveys should provide a comprehensive summary
of a research topic of interest to TALA, and identify open challenges and
new research directions for the field based on a thorough analysis of
current literature. Opinion pieces/commentaries should offer new personal
perspectives, visionary ideas, current challenges or summarize new research
opportunities on a topic related to TALA, be circa 2500-5000 words and be
accessible to a broad scientific audience.

Submission procedure

Before submitting, authors should read the AI&E submission guidelines at
https://www.springer.com/journal/43681 in full. To submit, you should visit
the online system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/aiet and create a new
account if you do not already have one. When creating your submission on
the system, select the article type (e.g., Original Research, Review, or
Opinion Paper), and then in the "Additional Information" section, answer
"Yes" when asked if your manuscript belongs to a special issue, then select
"T.C. : Trustworthy Adaptive and Learning Agents TALA". If you do not mark
your manuscript correctly as belonging to the TALA topical collection, it
may not reach the correct editors.

Guest Editors

Patrick Mannion (Lead Guest Editor), School of Computer Science, National
University of Ireland Galway

webpage
<https://www.nuigalway.ie/our-research/people/engineering-and-informatics/patrickmannion/>,
email:  patrick.mannion at nuigalway.ie

Fernando P. Santos, University of Amsterdam

webpage <https://fp-santos.github.io>, email: f.p.santos at uva.nl

Diederik M. Roijers, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & HU University Of Applied
Sciences Utrecht
webpage <http://roijers.info/index.html>, email: diederik.roijers at vub.be
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