In this blog post, Dr Alan Chamberlain offers some thoughts and reflections about the TAS Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Project that he co-leads with Prof Chis Greenhalgh.
So far on the project we’ve been supporting the other TAS Agile projects and offering support at events, such as the TAS Pump Priming Project launch and Early Career Researcher events. We’ve also been having regular team meetings to explore our own thoughts around RI and to start to develop approaches and different ways of thinking about RI in the context of TAS. (For our purposes “Responsible Research and Innovation” and “Responsible Innovation” are synonymous, and “Responsible Innovation” can be interpreted quite generally.)
As part of the project we wanted to help members of the TAS community to work through their RI-related issues and we’ve done this by creating some resources. Our first resource takes the form of a series of web-based resources that anyone can look at to get a broad appreciation of RI, understand its value and how to integrate RI into their projects. This is particularly important when writing proposals for new TAS projects and for the EPSRC too. It’s important to reflect on the nature of RI as something that isn’t static and doesn’t just exist at one point in time. Responsibility is spread across a project, its stakeholders and the practices and policies of the individuals and organisations who take part in the research. Understanding this and integrating RI in the project planning, during the project and even after the project, in terms of developing a post-project exit strategy and policy outputs is key to developing responsible research projects. We’ve found that different people on a project can have different ethical views and a range of perspectives on a given topic, which must be appreciated when we work in a multi-disciplinary context. However different these views are, it is important to listen to and appreciate each other’s methodological and personal positions and to use these to inform the research as the project develops, taking a respectful approach.
Above: Images from ACI workshop
One area that we’ve been thinking about is the sustainable nature of our research, how this impacts the environment and relates back to how we might move towards Net-Zero, policies that are at the forefront of UKRI research strategy. This is an area that we want to develop in the future to ensure that research is carried out in a sustainable way which has as little environmental impact as possible.
We’ve also developed a set of RRI Prompt and Practice cards that researchers can use to look at RI issues in their projects. These provide people with a series of high-level areas that they can focus on and then use as starting points to tailor to their own research projects. As I’ve already mentioned we’ve run a few sessions using these and the sessions have been really well received. Our last outing with the cards was at the Designing for Trust workshop, which was attended by both industry and academia, and enabled us to start thinking about the ways we might design spaces in which animals and humans co-exist with autonomous systems.
Designing Trust: Autonomous Animal-Centric Robotic & AI
[1] Alan Chamberlain, Steve Benford, Joel Fischer, Pepita Barnard, Chris Greenhalgh, Ju Row Farr, Nick Tandavanitj, and Matt Adams. 2022. Designing for Trust: Autonomous Animal-Centric Robotic & AI Systems. In Ninth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI’22), December 05–08, 2022, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566046