5th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
A single-track hybrid conference

Submission deadline: March 1, 2022 – 11:59pm AoE
Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aies2022
Notification: April 18, 2022
Conference: August 1-3, 2022

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to see heavy investments from industry and governments around the world. While some envision AI as a way to empower individuals and improve society, it is increasingly clear that the ethical ramifications of AI systems  and their impact on human societies requires deep and urgent reflection. International organizations, governments, universities, corporations, and philanthropists have recognised this urgent need to embark on an interdisciplinary investigation to help chart a course through the new territory enabled by AI. Earlier iterations of this conference and others have seen the first fruits of these calls to action, as programs for research have been set out in many fields relevant to AI, Ethics, and Society.

AIES is convened each year by program co-chairs from Computer Science, Law and Policy, the Social Sciences, Ethics and Philosophy. Our goal is to encourage talented scholars in these and related fields to submit their best work related to morality, law, policy, psychology, the other social sciences, and AI. Papers should be tailored for a multi-disciplinary audience without sacrificing excellence. In addition to the community of scholars who have participated in these discussions from the outset, we want to explicitly welcome disciplinary experts who are newer to this topic, and see ways to break new ground in their own fields by thinking about AI.

We are interested in any paper that touches on ethical or societal issues of AI technology and crosscuts any of the above fields.  For examples of topics, please see the CFPs and programs of previous AIES conferences, as well as a list below.

In addition to those, this year, we want to highlight as a theme the interaction of humans and AI.  For example: How should AI systems talk to humans? What effects do gendered persona have on human perceptions of AI? Should AI be allowed to use methods of nudging and persuasion to influence people? What is the human perception of AI agency and what does that imply for moral agency/patiency? How can AI support human autonomy? To what extent does AI need to be able to explain its decisions in a way humans understand? How do we know that an AI system is trustworthy? How should AI systems interact with groups of humans (e.g., in the context of teams such as the police force, the military, the work place, etc.)? What are the ethical concerns related to AI as bosses in a work context? What are the cultural differences related to human-AI interactions and how to address these in design and/or governance?  Other example topics within this theme (not an exhaustive list) would include:

– the social, ethical and societal implications of AI designed to influence people and their decision-making,

– the overlay of societal constructs such as race and gender onto machines and related effects on human-AI relations, or

– the dehumanization of warfare, policing, and social services through the introduction of telepresence and automation.

Submitted papers, whether within this theme or not, must make a substantive contribution to knowledge in one or more fields. A paper should clearly establish its research contribution, its relevance, and its relation to prior research.

Other example topics for the AIES conference series include:

• Cultural, political, and other societal impacts of AI
• AI and surveillance/manipulation of people
• Impact of AI on jobs and work
• Meaningful control, safety, and security of AI
• AI and geopolitics
• AI and vulnerable groups
• When, why and how to ban, restrict, cost and tax AI
• Ethical models/frameworks around AI and data 
• AI and environmental costs and impacts
• AI and labor, AI and markets
• Value alignment and moral decision making
• Trustworthy AI systems
• Black box systems and modes of investigation and explanation, interpretable AI
• Ethically-aligned design 
• Challenges and contradictions in AI-related design, development and ethics
• AI and the public interest, AI for social good
• Infrastructures of AI
• AI and law, regulation and governance
• AI and literature, performance, counter-culture, resistance
• New/novel AI-related concepts
• Speculative future AI design and implications
• Highly advanced / human-level AI and implications
• Innovative methodologies for studying/analyzing AI
• Developments in AI concepts, definitions, schools of thought 

Submitted papers must be 6-10 pages (including all figures and tables) in the “sigconf” 1-column or “sigconf” 2-column style of the ACM templates, see https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template, plus unlimited pages for (non-discursive) references. This typically corresponds to no more than 8,000 words for the main content.

Optionally, authors can upload supplementary materials (e.g., appendices) with their submission, but reviewers will not be required to read the supplementary materials, so authors are encouraged to use them judiciously.

Authors should note that changes to the author list after the submission deadline are not allowed. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for, attend, and present the work at the conference.

All submissions must be submitted through the EasyChair link on the conference website.

Review will be double-blind, so authors should remove identifying information from their papers. However, to assist selecting reviewers, authors should report the paper’s primary disciplines on the first page.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: All submitted papers must meet the above criteria. However, to accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can provide a one-page abstract of the paper for the conference proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper. Authors should guarantee the link to be reliable for at least two years. This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in a conference proceedings. Such papers must be submitted electronically and formatted just like papers submitted for full-text publication.

Papers submitted to AIES-2022 may not be published or accepted for publication at an archival conference or journal prior to submission to AIES.

The proceedings of the conference will be published in the AAAI and ACM Digital Libraries.

Recognizing that a multiplicity of perspectives leads to stronger science, the conference organizers actively welcome and encourage people with differing identities, expertise, backgrounds, beliefs, or experiences to participate.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR STUDENT TRACK SUBMISSIONS (deadline April 30, 2022):

The student track is intended to create some structured engagement between student participants and senior scholars at AIES in the form of one-on-one mentorship, and to give students the opportunity to share research-in-progress across disciplinary boundaries. In addition to attending the conference and meeting with a senior scholar, accepted students will share their research in a closed working group with other student track participants. All Student Track participants’ conference registration costs will be waived. All participants must submit a vita, an extended abstract describing their research, and a brief statement about why they wish to attend the conference. This research abstract can overlap substantially with any papers the applicant has submitted to the main track of AIES, but must not be identical. Abstracts will be allotted one page in the proceedings. Students who have submitted papers to the main track will be given equal consideration with those who have not.

Conference program co-chairs:

Matthias Scheutz (Tufts University)

Ryan Calo (University of Washington)

Martina Mara (Johannes Kepler University Linz)

Annette Zimmermann (University of York)