Verifiable Autonomous Systems: Using Rational Agents to Provide Assurance about Decisions Made by Machines

Dr Louise Dennis is leader of the Autonomy and Verification research group at the University of Manchester and conference coordinator for the ACM Special Interest Group for Artificial Intelligence. She studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford and received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in using AI techniques to prove mathematical theorems; her interest in the overlap between Mathematics, Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence has continued ever since. Her current research encompasses the programming of autonomous systems, the development of agent programming languages, reasoning about systems and programs via formal mathematical techniques, and the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence. Beyond the university setting, Dr Dennis is active in public engagement and spends a lot of time taking Lego Robots into schools to introduce robotics programming to children.

Dr Michael Fisher is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies and is a fellow of both the British Computer Society and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He was previously a Professor of Logic and Computation in the Department of Computing & Mathematics at the Manchester Metropolitan University and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. Dr Fisher's research concerns autonomous systems, particularly software engineering, formal verification, safety, responsibility, and trustworthiness. He has been involved in over 200 journal and conference papers and authored the book An Introduction to Practical Formal Methods using Temporal Logic (Wiley) in 2011.