We are excited to announce that three projects from the Information and Communication Technology 2023 (ICT) call “Digital Humanism” by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) have been selected for funding!

The projects that have been selected are:

• Julia Neidhardt’s project “Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity”. Julia will be working on this project together with Andreas Baumann and Hannes Fellner (both from the University of Vienna)
• “Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems” by Agatha Ciabattoni, who will be working together with John Horty (University of Maryland) and Cristinel Mateis (AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology)
• “Citizen-centered democratic innovation: Understanding citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms” by Jan Maly, who will be joined by Carolina Plescia (University of Vienna) The ICT 2023 call „Digital Humanism” invited scientists to conduct interdisciplinary research between the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences/ICT that address digital technologies and practices from a human-centered and societal perspective in the field of Digital Humanism. Together, the projects are funded with over 1.5 million Euros.

Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been permeating various facets of our daily lives. They influence our purchasing choices, employment decisions, social connections, and even impact the well-being of our children and the elderly. As such, it becomes imperative for AI systems to adhere to the legal, social, and ethical norms of the societies in which they operate. Addressing this imperative, the field of machine ethics is dedicated to crafting AI systems capable of embodying normative competence. A central open problem in this field is the acquisition and representation of normative information in a form that allows for machine implementation. This endeavor necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, which is offered by the AXAIS project. This project leverages diverse expertise to acquire norms for use in AI systems, with a focus on ensuring the explainability of decision-making processes guided by these norms. The project’s approach combines methodologies from Natural Language Processing, Logic, and Legal Reasoning. Through this synthesis, the aim is to create a framework capable of automatically translating extensive norm codes, while providing symbolic representations with a clear meaning. The envisioned framework champions explicable reasoning and allows complex normative information to be acquired from simple decisions, akin to the practice of case-based reasoning in legal contexts.

About Agata Ciabattoni

Agata Ciabattoni is a Full Professor at the TU Wien Informatics and the Head of the Research Unit Theory and Logic. She is the co-chair of the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA), a member of the council of the Association of Symbolic Logic, co-chair of the Steering Committee (SC) of the Society of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, and a member of several SC, including Women in Logic, a forum that supports women working on logic-related topics. In 2011 she received the START prize, the highest Austrian award for early career researchers, for her project Non classical proofs: Theory, Applications and Tools. Agata Ciabattoni works on logics different from classical logic: theory, applications and tools. Her running research projects include the WWTF project “TAIGER: Training and Guiding AI Agents with Ethical Rules” (with Ezio Bartocci and Thomas Eiter), and the FWF project (Weave with Germany and Luxembourg) “Logical methods for Deontic Explanations” (with Leon van der Torre and Christian Strasser).

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