Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents

Abstract: Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora l agent, in the first place. Then comes the problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed additional psychological (emotional and cogn itive) competence in cold moral machines. What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top- down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort

Embedding ASMs into state transition diagrams

This report relates Abstract State Machines (ASMs) with a particular diagram type of UML, the Sate Transition Diagrams (STDs). The principles of translating ASMs into STDs are discussed and demonstrated in four case studies

Abstract machines: overlaying virtual worlds on physical rides

Overlaying virtual worlds onto existing physical rides and altering the sensations of motion can deliver new experiences of thrill, but designing how motion is mapped between physical ride and virtual world is challenging. In this paper, we present the notion of an abstract machine, a new form of intermediate design knowledge that communicates motion mappings at the level of metaphor, mechanism and implementation. Following a performance-led, in-the-wild approach we report lessons from creating and touring VR Playground, a ride that overlays four distinct abstract machines and virtual worlds on a playground swing. We compare the artist's rationale with riders' reported experiences and analysis of their physical behaviours to reveal the distinct thrills of each abstract machine. Finally, we discuss how to make and use abstract machines in terms of heuristics for designing motion mappings, principles for virtual world design and communicating experiences to riders

Discovery learning approach to classic electrical machines principles

This paper aims at presenting the concept of Socratic interactions and discovery learning of classic electrical machines principles. The theories of electrical machines are by nature quite boring and abstract although there are a lot of experiments supported the theories. Traditional, students learnt the subject by drill and practice approach with standard textbooks. In the past two decades, computer is no doubt recognized to be the educational tool. The so-called “interactive” approach is applied to the learning process. Most of this approach applied to various subjects in different levels is mainly based on drill and practice. However, few packages are developed for electrical machine subject. In this paper, two different approaches “Rote Learning” and “Discovery Learning” applied to the interactive computer aided learning package of classic electric machine principles are discussed. Design of a discovery learning approach will also be presented

On the topological aspects of the theory of represented spaces

Represented spaces form the general setting for the study of computability derived from Turing machines. As such, they are the basic entities for endeavors such as computable analysis or computable measure theory. The theory of represented spaces is well-known to exhibit a strong topological flavour. We present an abstract and very succinct introduction to the field; drawing heavily on prior work by Escard\'o, Schr\"oder, and others. Central aspects of the theory are function spaces and various spaces of subsets derived from other represented spaces, and -- closely linked to these -- properties of represented spaces such as compactness, overtness and separation principles. Both the derived spaces and the properties are introduced by demanding the computability of certain mappings, and it is demonstrated that typically various interesting mappings induce the same property.Comment: Earlier versions were titled "Compactness and separation for represented spaces" and "A new introduction to the theory of represented spaces

Design principles of reconfigurable machines

Abstract Reconfigurable machines form a new class of machines that are designed around a specific part family of products and allow rapid change in their structure. They are designed to allow changes in machine configuration according to changes in production requirements. The reconfiguration may be related to changes in machine functionality or its scalability, i.e., the change in production volumes or speed of operation. Reconfigurable machines represent a new class of machines that bridges the gap between the high flexibility and high cost of totally flexible machines and the low flexibility and low cost of fully dedicated machines. The design principles of reconfigurable machines follow a similar philosophy, which was derived for reconfigurable manufacturing systems, and present an approach for the design of machines to be used mainly in high-volume production lines. This paper introduces design principles for reconfigurable machines, which may be applied in different fields of manufacturing. Based on these design principles, three types of reconfigurable machines were designed for various types of production operations such as: machining, inspection and assembly. This paper shows how the suggested design principles were utilized in the design of several full-scale machine prototypes and tested experimentally

Semantics-directed generation of compilers and abstract machines

In traditional compiler design the work of a compiler is divided into several phases: lexical, syntactical and semantical analysis, optimizations and code generation. For several of these phases generators exist -- most prominently LEX and YACC for generating lexical and syntactical analyzers. A common feature of all generators is that the phase in the compiler is described using a meta-language (e.g. regular expressions or context-free grammars) and that the generator produces the related compiler module. There exist several good textbooks on compiler design. However, all of these books present ready made mappings from source language constructs to target language constructs, the so called translation schemes, instead of deriving them. Hence, the reader is expected to learn how to design code generators by analysing translation schemes as opposed to from first principles. The same is true for abstract machines. Abstract machines are virtual target architectures which support the concepts of the source language. Typically abstract machines are presented together with translation schemes from the source language to the abstract machine language. There is only little work on how translation schemes and abstract machines are designed. The aim of our work is to detect underlying principles that relate abstract machines to programming language semantics, and to automate part of the design process for abstract machines. Thus, we need to ensure that the behaviour of a source program will be maintained by translating it into the abstract machine language, and then applying the abstract machine. The behaviour of a program will depend on it's semantics. Often this aspect of a programming language is only described in natural language which is both ambiguous and vague. We shall use formal techniques to describe the meaning of programs in a particular language and to prove that our transformations are correct. In this thesis we concentrate on natural semantics, but we also address action semantics

Semantics-directed generation of compilers and abstract machines

In traditional compiler design the work of a compiler is divided into several phases: lexical, syntactical and semantical analysis, optimizations and code generation. For several of these phases generators exist -- most prominently LEX and YACC for generating lexical and syntactical analyzers. A common feature of all generators is that the phase in the compiler is described using a meta-language (e.g. regular expressions or context-free grammars) and that the generator produces the related compiler module. There exist several good textbooks on compiler design. However, all of these books present ready made mappings from source language constructs to target language constructs, the so called translation schemes, instead of deriving them. Hence, the reader is expected to learn how to design code generators by analysing translation schemes as opposed to from first principles. The same is true for abstract machines. Abstract machines are virtual target architectures which support the concepts of the source language. Typically abstract machines are presented together with translation schemes from the source language to the abstract machine language. There is only little work on how translation schemes and abstract machines are designed. The aim of our work is to detect underlying principles that relate abstract machines to programming language semantics, and to automate part of the design process for abstract machines. Thus, we need to ensure that the behaviour of a source program will be maintained by translating it into the abstract machine language, and then applying the abstract machine. The behaviour of a program will depend on it\u27s semantics. Often this aspect of a programming language is only described in natural language which is both ambiguous and vague. We shall use formal techniques to describe the meaning of programs in a particular language and to prove that our transformations are correct. In this thesis we concentrate on natural semantics, but we also address action semantics