SafeAI 2021 - The AAAI's Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety

The accelerated developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) hint at the need for considering Safety as a design principle rather than an option. However, theoreticians and practitioners of AI and Safety are confronted with different levels of safety, different ethical standards and values, and different degrees of liability, that force them to examine a multitude of trade-offs and alternative solutions. These choices can only be analyzed holistically if the technological and ethical perspectives are integrated into the engineering problem, while considering both the theoretical and practical challenges of AI safety. A new and comprehensive view of AI Safety must cover a wide range of AI paradigms, including systems that are application-specific as well as those that are more general, considering potentially unanticipated risks. In this workshop, we want to explore ways to bridge short-term with long-term issues, idealistic with pragmatic solutions, operational with policy issues, and industry with academia, to build, evaluate, deploy, operate and maintain AI-based systems that are demonstrably safe.
This workshop seeks to explore new ideas on AI safety with particular focus on addressing the following questions:
What is the status of existing approaches in ensuring AI and Machine Learning (ML) safety, and what are the gaps?
How can we engineer trustable AI software architectures?
How can we make AI-based systems more ethically aligned?
What safety engineering considerations are required to develop safe human-machine interaction?
What AI safety considerations and experiences are relevant from industry?
How can we characterize or evaluate AI systems according to their potential risks and vulnerabilities?
How can we develop solid technical visions and new paradigms about AI Safety?
How do metrics of capability and generality, and the trade-offs with performance affect safety?
The main interest of the proposed workshop is to look at a new perspective of system engineering where multiple disciplines such as AI and safety engineering are viewed as a larger whole, while considering ethical and legal issues, in order to build trustable intelligent autonomy.
Contributions are sought in (but are not limited to) the following topics:
Safety in AI-based system architectures
Continuous V&V and predictability of AI safety properties
Runtime monitoring and (self-)adaptation of AI safety
Accountability, responsibility and liability of AI-based systems
Effect of uncertainty in AI safety
Avoiding negative side effects in AI-based systems
Role and effectiveness of oversight: corrigibility and interruptibility
Loss of values and the catastrophic forgetting problem
Confidence, self-esteem and the distributional shift problem
Safety of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems and the role of generality
Reward hacking and training corruption
Self-explanation, self-criticism and the transparency problem
Human-machine interaction safety
Regulating AI-based systems: safety standards and certification
Human-in-the-loop and the scalable oversight problem
Evaluation platforms for AI safety
AI safety education and awareness
Experiences in AI-based safety-critical systems, including industrial processes, health, automotive systems, robotics, critical infrastructures, among others