Ethics and Autonomous Vehicles Workshop

Deadline for abstracts: Aug 30th 
Abstracts (up to 500 words) should be submitted via email to Aisocietyncstate@gmail.com.

In the email, please note the title, names and contact information of co-authors and designated presenting and corresponding authors. Also, please note whether you wish to pursue publication in the journal AI & Society: https://link.springer.com/journal/146/updates/26681120

Authors who have already submitted to the special collection of the journal should send the abstract as submitted in the Springer/Nature manuscript tracking system.

The deadline to submit the full paper is December 30th, but we welcome earlier submissions.

More information is available at https://go.ncsu.edu/ai-society

Morning Keynote Speaker: Dr. Noah Goodall (Virginia DOT)

Title: How to Talk to Engineers about Autonomous Vehicle Ethics

Abstract: Engineers building autonomous vehicles often dismiss ethical discussions as impractical philosophical exercises, particularly when confronted with trolley problem scenarios. Yet all driving introduces risk, and decisions about how to distribute this risk among road users have clear ethical components that cannot be ignored. This talk draws on my experiences from the early days of automated vehicle research, when engineers, philosophers, sociologists, and legal scholars first collaborated on this emerging technology under intense media scrutiny. Based on these experiences—and the frequent communication failures I witnessed —I argue for a strategic reframing of automated vehicle ethics using risk management principles that engineers already understand and value. Rather than starting with hypothetical crash dilemmas, I demonstrate how routine driving decisions about lane positioning, following distances, and headway selection involve probabilistic risk distribution with obvious moral implications. This risk-centered approach provides transparent, quantifiable frameworks for ethical decision-making while speaking the language of trade-offs and optimization that engineers find familiar and actionable. This approach is crucial for engaging rather than repelling the engineers who, in the absence of legislation, are ultimately the ones embedding moral decisions into their software.

Afternoon Keynote Speaker: Dr. Chandra Bhat (University of Texas as Austin)

Title: Behaviorally Grounded Ethics for Autonomous Mobility and Access to Activities

Abstract: The integration of autonomous vehicles (AVs) into modern transportation systems raises profound ethical, behavioral, and societal questions. At the forefront of this dialogue is the challenge of embedding ethical reasoning into AV decision-making, particularly when faced with trade-offs involving safety, fairness, access to activities, and individual freedom. While popular discussions often focus on moral dilemmas such as the “trolley problem,” a more impactful ethical inquiry centers on systemic issues—who benefits, who are at risk of being left behind, and how AV deployment reshapes mobility and activity access patterns. In this presentation, we will discuss the importance of understanding individual activity-travel behavior for ethically informed AV design and policy, emphasizing the heterogeneity of preferences across population groups, and underscoring the need for AV systems and infrastructure investments to recognize diverse mobility and activity access needs. In this regard, the abstract moral frameworks that dominate AV ethics debates must evolve to include theoretically and empirically grounded insights on how people actually make activity-travel decisions, and how those decisions interact with infrastructure, pricing, and policy. Bridging this gap between normative ethics and activity-travel behavioral science is essential to ensure that AVs promote not just technological efficiency, but also social good.

About the keynotes:

Noah Goodall is a senior research scientist with the Virginia Transportation Research Council, a partnership between the Virginia Department of Transportation and the University of Virginia. He researches safety, operations, and autonomous vehicles.

More information on Dr. Goodall is available at https://go.ncsu.edu/casespeakers.goodall

Chandra R. Bhat is the Joe J. King Endowed Chair Professor in Engineering at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where he teaches courses in transportation systems analysis and transportation planning.  He has been a pioneer in the formulation and use of statistical and econometric methods to analyze human choice behavior for transportation and urban policy design. His current research includes the social and environmental aspects of transportation, planning implications of connected and automated smart transportation systems (CASTS), e-commerce and information and communication technology (ICT) impacts on the activity and mobility behaviors of consumers and upstream supply chain providers, and data science and predictive analytics. He is a recipient of many awards, including, most recently, the 2024 W.N. Carey, Jr. Distinguished Service Award from the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the 2024 Joe King Professional Service Award from the University of Texas’s Cockrell Engineering School. He was listed in 2017 as one of the top ten transportation thought leaders in academia by the Eno Foundation. Dr. Bhat currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research – Part B, as well as the Director of the USDOT-funded National Center on “Understanding the Future of Travel Behavior and Demand”.

More information on Dr. Bhat is available at https://go.ncsu.edu/casespeakers.bhat

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Dario Cecchini, Ph.D.
Post Doctoral Research Scholar
NeuroComputational Ethics Research Group
Personal webpage

North Carolina State University,
Department of philosophy and religious studies,
Withers Hall 345
dcecchi@ncsu.edu
+1 (919) 5156106