AIES

It is our great honour to introduce the proceedings of the 2020 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society - AIES 2020. The third edition of this conference was co-located with AAAI-20 on February 7-8, 2020 in New York City, New York, USA.

As AI (and associated AI-hype) grows more pervasive in our lives, its impact on society is ever more significant, raising ethical concerns and challenges regarding issues such as privacy, safety and security, surveillance, inequality, data handling and bias, personal agency, power relations, effective modes of regulation, accountability, sanctions, and workforce displacement. Only a multidisciplinary effort can find the best ways to address these concerns, including experts from various disciplines, such as ethics, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, law, history, politics, interaction design, informatics, social studies of science and technology, communication and media studies, and political science, as well as those with lived experience in relation to the impacts of AI systems. In order to address these issues in a scientific context, AAAI and ACM joined forces in 2018 to start the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.

Recognizing that a multiplicity of perspectives leads to stronger science, the conference organizers actively welcomed and encouraged people with differing identities, expertise, backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences to participate. This year's conference again contributed to building a community of shared concepts and concerns. With submissions ranging across a diverse array of fields, including computer science, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, and law, we enjoyed two days of engaging contributions that provided new paths for research.

The call for papers attracted 211 submissions. Of these, 34 were accepted to be presented with talks, and another 37 with posters. Five invited talks completed the technical programme: Peter Dabrock of Friedrich Alexander University in Nuremberg and the German Ethics Council who spoke on "How to Put the Data Subject's Sovereignty into Practice. Ethical Considerations and Governance Perspectives"; Anita Gurumurthy, executive director of IT for Change, who spoke on "The AI-development connection: a view from the South"; Charlton McIlwain of New York University who spoke on "Computerize the Race Problem? Why We Must Plan for a Just AI Future"; Gina Neff of the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford who spoke on "From Bad Users and Failed Uses to Responsible Technologies: A Call to Expand the AI Ethics Toolkit"; and Frank Pasquale of the University of Maryland who spoke on "Machines Judging Humans: The Promise and Perils of Formalizing Evaluative Criteria".