This book focuses on the potential benefits that the so-called smart technologies have been bringing to the urban reality and to the management and governance of the city, simultaneously highlighting the necessity for its responsible and ethically guided deployment, respecting essential humanistic values. The urban ecosystem has been, in the last decades, the locus to where the most advanced forms of technological innovation converge, creating intelligent management platforms meant to produce models of energy, water consumption, mobility/transportation, waste management and efficient cities. Due to the coincidence of the punctual overlap of its own genesis with the pandemics outbreak, the present book came to embody both the initial dream and desire of an intelligent city place of innovation, development and equity - a dream present in most of the chapters - and the fear not just of the pandemics per se, but of the consequences that this may have for the character of the intelligent city and for the nature of its relationship with its dwellers that, like a mother, it is supposed to nurture, shelter and protect.

This present book provides valuable insights on the technical, societal and legal challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligent systems in a plethora of different applications, from embodied robotic systems to ML algorithms. Engaging with concerns about equity, privacy, surveillance and respect for human dignity, "Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems" highlights the fundamental factors on which stakeholders' trust relies, identifying benchmarking, standardisation and certification as milestones grounding and consolidating that future trust. The multidisciplinary approach followed will make this book a valuable resource for all those involved in the production and deployment of AIs, as well as for academia and legal practitioners.

This book provides an integrated framework for natural and artificial cognition by highlighting the fundamental role played by the cognitive architecture in the dialectics with the surrounding environment and consequently in the definition of a particular meaningful world. This book is also about embodied and non-embodied artificial systems, cognitive architectures that are human constructs, meant to be able to populate the human world, capable of identifying different life contexts and replicating human patterns of behavior capable of acting according to human values and conventions, systems that perform tasks in a human-like way. By identifying the essential phenomena at the core of all forms of cognition, the book addresses the topic of design of artificial cognitive architectures in the domains of robotics and artificial life. Moving from mere bio-inspired design methodology it aims to open a pathway to semiotically determined design.

This book aims to discuss the technical and ethical challenges posed by the present technological framework and to highlight the fundamental role played by human-centred design and human factors in the definition of robotic architectures for human-robot collaboration. The book gives an updated overview of the most recent robotic technology, conceived and designed to collaborate with human beings in industrial working scenarios. The technological development of robotics over the last years and the fast evolution of AI, machine learning and IoT have paved the way for applications that extend far beyond the typical use of robots performing repetitive tasks in exclusive spaces. In this new technological paradigm that is expected to drive the robotics market in the coming years, robots and workers will coexist in the same workplace, sharing not only this lived space, but also the roles and functions inherent to a process of production, merging the benefits of automated and manual performing. However, having robots cooperating in real time with workers, responding in a physical, psychological and social adequate way, requires a human-centred design that not only calls for high safety standards regulating the quality of human-robot interaction, but also demands the robot's fine-grained perception and awareness of the dynamics of its surrounding environment, namely the behaviours of their human peers-their expected actions/responses-fostering the necessary collaborative efforts towards the accomplishment of the tasks to be executed.

This book focuses on the potential benefits that the so-called smart technologies have been bringing to the urban reality and to the management and governance of the city, simultaneously highlighting the necessity for its responsible and ethically guided deployment, respecting essential humanistic values. The urban ecosystem has been, in the last decades, the locus to where the most advanced forms of technological innovation converge, creating intelligent management platforms meant to produce models of energy, water consumption, mobility/transportation, waste management and efficient cities. Due to the coincidence of the punctual overlap of its own genesis with the pandemics outbreak, the present book came to embody both the initial dream and desire of an intelligent city place of innovation, development and equity - a dream present in most of the chapters - and the fear not just of the pandemics per se, but of the consequences that this may have for the character of the intelligent city and for the nature of its relationship with its dwellers that, like a mother, it is supposed to nurture, shelter and protect.

This book aims to discuss the technical and ethical challenges posed by the present technological framework and to highlight the fundamental role played by human-centred design and human factors in the definition of robotic architectures for human-robot collaboration. The book gives an updated overview of the most recent robotic technology, conceived and designed to collaborate with human beings in industrial working scenarios. The technological development of robotics over the last years and the fast evolution of AI, machine learning and IoT have paved the way for applications that extend far beyond the typical use of robots performing repetitive tasks in exclusive spaces. In this new technological paradigm that is expected to drive the robotics market in the coming years, robots and workers will coexist in the same workplace, sharing not only this lived space, but also the roles and functions inherent to a process of production, merging the benefits of automated and manual performing. However, having robots cooperating in real time with workers, responding in a physical, psychological and social adequate way, requires a human-centred design that not only calls for high safety standards regulating the quality of human-robot interaction, but also demands the robot's fine-grained perception and awareness of the dynamics of its surrounding environment, namely the behaviours of their human peers-their expected actions/responses-fostering the necessary collaborative efforts towards the accomplishment of the tasks to be executed.

This book contains the Proceedings of the International Conference on Robot Ethics, held in Lisbon on October 23 and 24, 2015. The conference provided a multidisciplinary forum for discussing central and evolving issues concerning safety and ethics that have arisen in various contexts where robotic technologies are being applied. The papers are intended to promote the formulation of more precise safety standards and ethical frameworks for the rapidly changing field of robotic applications. The conference was held at Pavilhao do Conhecimento/Ciencia Viva in Lisbon and brought together leading researchers and industry representatives, promoting a dialogue that combines different perspectives and experiences to arrive at viable solutions for ethical problems in the context of robotics. The conference topics included but were not limited to emerging ethical, safety, legal and societal problems in the following domains: * Service/Social Robots: Robots performing tasks in human environments and involving close human-robot interactions in everyday households; robots for education and entertainment; and robots employed in elderly and other care applications * Mobile Robots: Self-driving vehicles, autonomous aircraft, trains, cars and drones * Robots used in medicine and for therapeutic purposes * Robots used in surveillance and military functions