Call for papers: We Robot 2014

We Robot 2014 – Conference on Legal and Policy Issues Relating to Robotics
University of Miami Law School, Coral Gables, FL
April 4-5, 2014
Submission/Registration Deadline: November 4, 2013

Robotics is becoming a transformative technology that presents many legal and social challenges. This conference will build on existing scholarship that explores how the increasing sophistication and autonomous decision-making capabilities of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield disrupts existing legal regimes or requires rethinking of various policy issues.

Call for papers
We Robot 2014 seeks contributions by academics, practitioners, and developers in the form of scholarly papers or presentations of relevant projects, and invites your reports from the front lines of robot design and development, as well as contributions for works-in-progress sessions. Through this interdisciplinary gathering, organizers encourage conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate. Organizers particularly encourage contributions resulting from interdisciplinary collaborations, such as those between legal or policy scholars and roboticists.

Topics of interest for the scholarly paper portion of the conference include but are not limited to:

• Risks and opportunities of robot deployment in the workplace, the home, and other contexts where robots and humans work side-by-side.
• Issues related to software-only systems such as automated trading agents.
• Regulatory and licensing issues raised by robots in the home, the office, in public spaces (e.g. roads), and in specialized environments such as hospitals.
• Design of legal rules that will strike the right balance between encouraging innovation and safety, particularly in the context of autonomous robots.
• Issues of legal or moral responsibility, e.g. relating to autonomous robots or robots capable of exhibiting emergent behavior.
• Usage of robots in public safety and military contexts.
• Privacy issues relating to data collection by robots, either built for that purpose or incidental to other tasks.
• Intellectual property challenges relating to robotics as a nascent industry, to works or inventions created by robots, or otherwise peculiar to robotics.
• Issues arising from automation of professional tasks such as unauthorized practice of law or medicine.
• How legal scholars should think about robots, and how roboticists should think about the legal code.

See the We Robot 2014 Call for Proposals for submission guidelines.

2014 Program Committee
A. Michael Froomkin, Chair
Ryan Calo
Ian Kerr
Bill Smart
Dan Siciliano
Holly Yanco
Leila Takayama

See Robohub’s coverage from We Robot 2013. 

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Robohub Editors