Centre for Assuring Autonomy team members celebrate double award win
Academics and researchers from the Centre for Assuring Autonomy have received two notable awards for recent papers at separate conferences.
At the 2024 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) the paper "Analyzing and Debugging Normative Requirements via Satisfiability Checking” was awarded the Distinguished Paper Award at the flagship event. The paper was co-authored by the Centre’s Professor Radu Calinescu, Dr Calum Imrie and Dr Ioannis Stefanakos, as well as Dr. Sinem Getir Yaman, Professor Ana Cavalcanti, Dr. Bev Townsend and Isobel Standen from the University of York.
The research was a collaboration between a major research strand of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Resilience project, a research team at the University of Toronto, and members of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP).
The AAIP spearheaded research, training and standards to assure the safety of robotics and autonomous systems, and researchers in the Programme are now working in the Centre for Assuring Autonomy, which builds upon the work of the AAIP.
Professor Calinescu said: "I am delighted that our research to develop autonomous systems that comply with human values has received such recognition at the top software engineering conference.
“Ensuring that AI-enabled autonomous systems respect social, legal, ethical, empathetic and cultural norms is essential for their successful and safe deployment, and our theoretical framework and tools for the specification, validation and verification of normative requirements represent a major step towards achieving this.”
Of the 234 accepted papers presented during the conference, the paper was one of the 14 Distinguished Paper awards.
The ICSE is the flagship annual event in the field of computer science which focuses specifically on software engineering. It acts as a leading platform for researchers, practitioners, and educators worldwide to showcase, discuss, and deliberate on the most recent innovations, trends, and experiences in the realm of software engineering.
Following this, both Dr Imrie and Professor Calinescu were also awarded Best Paper at the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS) for their work as co-authors on “Formal Synthesis of Uncertainty Reduction Controllers”.
Their work was a collaboration with AAIP Programme Fellow and Doctoral Student at Humboldt University of Berlin Marc Carwehl.
Dr Imrie said: "It is an absolute honour to have received the SEAMS 2024 Best Paper award, and an even greater privilege to have been able to work with an excellent team of researchers from across the world.
“Tackling uncertainty within systems and how to manage them at runtime is a difficult topic, but one that needs answering from a diverse group of researchers, especially if we are to expect safer autonomous systems.
“The discussions that this paper spurred at the conference were insightful and we are already planning how to continue this work to capture various levels of uncertainty present within operations concerning autonomous systems."
Read the papers via the links below: