Category: Artificial Intelligence

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About Wearable Social Robots

The market for wearable social robots remains relatively small. As illustrated by the case of AIBI, early models often face typical teething problems, with user forums filled with questions and complaints. Nevertheless, these technologies hold potential for a wide range of future applications, offering support and benefits not only to healthy individuals but also to people with disabilities or impairments. The paper “Wearable Social Robots for the Disabled and Impaired” by Oliver Bendel explores this topic in depth. It defines wearable social robots and situates them within the broader category of wearable robotics. The paper presents several examples and outlines potential application areas specifically for individuals with disabilities. It also addresses key social, ethical, economic, and technical challenges, building on the preceding analysis. The paper has been accepted for presentation at ICSR 2025, which will take place in Naples from September 10 to 12.

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Short Papers at ICSR 2025

The ICSR is one of the leading conferences for social robotics worldwide. The 17th edition will take place from 10 to 12 September 2025 in Naples, Italy. The deadline for submitting short papers is approaching. Short papers consist of 5 pages of body text plus 1 page references. The most important conference dates are: Short Paper Submission: June 18, 2025; Short Paper Notification: July 7t, 2025; Camera-ready: July 11, 2025; Paper Presentation Days at ICSR’25: September 11 and 12, 2025. All dates are listed on the website. “The conference of theme, ‘Emotivation at the Core: Empowering Social Robots to Inspire and Connect,’ highlights the essential role of ‘Emotivation’ in social robotics. Emotivation captures the synergy between emotion and motivation, where emotions trigger and sustain motivation during interactions. In social robotics, this concept is key to building trust, fostering empathy, and supporting decision-making by enabling robots to respond sensitively to human emotions, inspiring engagement and action.” (Website ICSR) Participants will meet for two days at the Parthenope University of Naples and for the third day at the Città della Scienza conference center. All buildings and rooms are also listed on the website. The PDF of the CfP can be downloaded here.

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The Trolley Problem in the AAAI Proceedings

On May 28, 2025, the “Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Spring Symposium Series” (Vol. 5 No. 1) were published. Oliver Bendel was involved in two papers at the symposium “Human-Compatible AI for Well-being: Harnessing Potential of GenAI for AI-Powered Science”. The paper “Revisiting the Trolley Problem for AI: Biases and Stereotypes in Large Language Models and their Impact on Ethical Decision-Making” by Sahan Hatemo, Christof Weickhardt, Luca Gisler, and Oliver Bendel is summarized as follows: “The trolley problem has long served as a lens for exploring moral decision-making, now gaining renewed significance in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). This study investigates ethical reasoning in three open-source large language models (LLMs) – LLaMA, Mistral and Qwen – through variants of the trolley problem. By introducing demographic prompts (age, nationality and gender) into three scenarios (switch, loop and footbridge), we systematically evaluate LLM responses against human survey data from the Moral Machine experiment. Our findings reveal notable differences: Mistral exhibits a consistent tendency to over-intervene, while Qwen chooses to intervene less and LLaMA balances between the two. Notably, demographic attributes, particularly nationality, significantly influence LLM decisions, exposing potential biases in AI ethical reasoning. These insights underscore the necessity of refining LLMs to ensure fairness and ethical alignment, leading the way for more trustworthy AI systems.” The renowned and traditional conference took place from March 31 to April 2, 2025 in San Francisco. The proceedings are available at ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI-SS/issue/view/654.

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Miss Tammy in the AAAI Proceedings

On May 28, 2025, the “Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Spring Symposium Series” (Vol. 5 No. 1) were published. Oliver Bendel was involved in two papers at the symposium “Human-Compatible AI for Well-being: Harnessing Potential of GenAI for AI-Powered Science”. The paper “Miss Tammy as a Use Case for Moral Prompt Engineering” by Myriam Rellstab and Oliver Bendel is summarized as follows: “This paper describes an LLM-based chatbot as a use case for moral prompt engineering. Miss Tammy, as it is called, was created between February 2024 and February 2025 at the FHNW School of Business as a custom GPT. Different types of prompt engineering were used. In addition, RAG was applied by building a knowledge base with a collection of netiquettes. These usually guide the behavior of users in communities but also seem to be useful to control the actions of chatbots and make them competent in relation to the behavior of humans. The tests with pupils aged between 14 and 16 showed that the custom GPT had significant advantages over the standard GPT-4o model in terms of politeness, appropriateness, and clarity. It is suitable for de-escalating conflicts and steering dialogues in the right direction. It can therefore contribute to users’ well-being and is a step forward in human-compatible AI.” The renowned and traditional conference took place from March 31 to April 2, 2025 in San Francisco. The proceedings are available at ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI-SS/issue/view/654.

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Robots, Chatbots, and Voice Assistants

The GROUND workshop (advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots‘ aDaptive behavior) is back for its third edition and will take place on June 30, 2025, as part of the IAS 19 Conference in Genoa, Italy. The keynote speeches will be given by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, FHNW School of Business, and Prof. Dr. Silvia Rossi, University of Naples. The talk by the technology philosopher and business information scientist from Zurich entitled “Robots, chatbots, and voice assistants in the classroom” is summarized as follows on the Ground website: “Chatbots, voice assistants, and robots – both programmable machines and social robots – have been used in learning for decades. Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel from the FHNW School of Business in Switzerland presents his own projects from 15 years. Some of his chatbots and voice assistants, such as GOODBOT, BESTBOT, and SPACE THEA, recognized user problems and responded appropriately. They showed empathy and emotion. Pepper was used as an educational application for children with diabetes, and Alpha Mini as an educational application for elementary schools. Chatbots for dead, endangered, and extinct languages such as @ve, @llegra, and kAIxo can be integrated into learning environments for all ages. Today, the technology philosopher and information systems expert mainly uses GPTs such as Social Robotics Girl and Digital Ethics Girl in his courses. They can receive and answer questions from several students at the same time, even if they are asked in different languages. They are specialists in their field thanks to prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In his talk, Oliver Bendel will ask how chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots will be designed as adaptive systems for multi-user settings in the future. These capabilities are especially important in the classroom.” Further information is available at ground-hri.github.io/workshop/.

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GROUND Workshop in Genoa

The GROUND workshop (advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots’ aDaptive behavior) is back for its third edition and will take place on June 30, 2025, as part of the IAS 19 Conference in Genoa, Italy. This full-day event focuses on robotics in multiparty scenarios and human-robot interaction in group settings. It offers a unique platform for researchers and practitioners to share ideas, explore new approaches, and connect with a passionate community working at the intersection of social interaction and robotics. Participants can look forward to inspiring keynotes and talks by Prof. Dr. Silvia Rossi, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, and Dr. Isabel Neto, along with a hands-on tutorial led by Lorenzo Ferrini. The workshop invites short contributions (2–4 pages plus references) that present innovative strategies for advancing group-robot interaction. Key dates to keep in mind: the submission deadline is May 31, 2025; notifications of acceptance will be sent out on June 17, and the final camera-ready papers are due by June 22. For more information, visit the workshop website, the IAS-19 conference page, or go directly to the submission portal. Questions can be directed to: groundworkshop@gmail.com.

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Manipulated Chatbots as Munchausen Machines

In 2013, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel came up with the idea for his LIEBOT, also known as Lügenbot. On September 11, 2013, he published an article titled “Der Lügenbot und andere Münchhausen-Maschinen” in the magazine CyberPress. More articles and contributions followed until a prototype was implemented in 2016. Kevin Schwegler, then a student of the philosopher of technology, was responsible for this work. He developed a chatbot that transformed truthful statements into false ones using seven different strategies. In the summer of 2016, for example, LIEBOT claimed that Donald Trump was the President of the United States. To make this statement, it had used information from Yahoo in a multi-step process. The results of the project were documented in a paper titled “Towards Kant Machines” and presented in March 2017 at the AAAI Spring Symposia at Stanford University. One might argue that LIEBOT does not have intentions of its own and therefore does not lie in the strict sense. However, this intent was programmed into it. In a way, it lies on behalf of its creators. With this project, Oliver Bendel wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to build dialogue systems capable of spreading falsehoods. Today, such systems seem to be omnipresent in the form of LLMs. However, one has to look closely to discern the differences. In his book “300 Keywords Generative KI”, Oliver Bendel writes: “Hallucinating machines do not necessarily qualify as Munchausen machines in the strict sense, since there is no intent – or at least intent can hardly be proven.” Manipulated LLM-based chatbots, on the other hand, come very close to LIEBOT. ChatGPT and similar systems pursue a political agenda and exhibit an ideological tendency.

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ICSR 2025 Extends Deadline for Submission

The ICSR is one of the leading conferences for social robotics worldwide. The 17th edition will take place from 10 to 12 September 2025 in Naples, Italy. The deadline for the submission of complete entries has been extended again. Papers should consist of 11 pages of body text plus references as appropriate. The most important conferences dates are: Full Paper Submission: April 30th, 2025; Full Paper Notification: June 6th, 2025; Camera-ready: June 30th, 2025; Paper Presentation Days at ICSR’25: September 11th and 12th, 2025. All dates are also listed on the website. “The conference theme, ‘Emotivation at the Core: Empowering Social Robots to Inspire and Connect,’ highlights the essential role of ‘Emotivation’ in social robotics. Emotivation captures the synergy between emotion and motivation, where emotions trigger and sustain motivation during interactions. In social robotics, this concept is key to building trust, fostering empathy, and supporting decision-making by enabling robots to respond sensitively to human emotions, inspiring engagement and action.” (Website ICSR) Participants will meet for two days at the Parthenope University of Naples and for the third day at the Città della Scienza conference center. All buildings and rooms are also listed on the website.

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Image Synthesis from an Ethical Perspective

The article “Image Synthesis from an Ethical Perspective” by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel was published as an electronic version in the journal AI & SOCIETY on September 27, 2023. It addresses the ethical implications of image generators, i.e., a specific form of generative AI. It can now also be found in the current print edition from February 2025 (Volume 40, Issue 2). From the abstract: “Generative AI has gained a lot of attention in society, business, and science. This trend has increased since 2018, and the big breakthrough came in 2022. In particular, AI-based text and image generators are now widely used. This raises a variety of ethical issues. The present paper first gives an introduction to generative AI and then to applied ethics in this context. Three specific image generators are presented: DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. The author goes into technical details and basic principles, and compares their similarities and differences. This is followed by an ethical discussion. The paper addresses not only risks, but opportunities for generative AI. A summary with an outlook rounds off the article.” A lot has happened with image generators since 2023. The new one from OpenAI now also allows photorealistic images, and it has fewer problems with average-looking people – DALL-E 2 and 3 favored beauty over mediocrity and ugliness. The article can be downloaded from link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01780-4 (Image: DALL-E 3).

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Revisiting the Trolley Problem for AI

The paper “Revisiting the Trolley Problem for AI: Biases and Stereotypes in Large Language Models and their Impact on Ethical Decision-Making” by Şahan Hatemo, Christof Weickhardt, Luca Gisler, and Oliver Bendel received the Special Paper Award from the reviewers of the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium “Human-Compatible AI for Well-being: Harnessing Potential of GenAI for AI-Powered Science”. The three bachelor students from the FHNW School of Computer Science gave their presentation on site in San Francisco as part of the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposia. Prof. Dr. Bendel from the FHNW School of Business had given them feedback on the project and placed it in the context of machine ethics. He has been involved in the well-known and popular conference, which usually takes place at Stanford University, since 2016. This time, he was keeping his fingers crossed from Italy. The proceedings of the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposia will be published shortly.