Projects:
The Moral Machine

An experiment for crowdsourcing assessments of morally significant outcomes in hypothetical autonomous vehicle ethical dilemma scenarios. We collected over 40 million decisions from around the world at time of study. We added a "Classic" section too, where visitors could be surveyed on human-agent ethical dilemmas.

I contributed significantly to the design process, and in development of many features, including the design wizard, scenario browser, result screen, share panel, cloud migration, and language internationalization.

We also studied assignment of blame in the case of override-capable human+AI piloting situations using a limited-pool study, and crowdsourcing of ethical decision-making.

HTML5/CSS3/Bootstrap + MeteorJS/NodeJS/BlazeJS + MongoDB + AWS S3 + Meteor Galaxy + i18n + D3.js (experiment survey tool); Python (data analysis)

MIT Media Lab, 2016-2017

Publications:

• Awad, E., Dsouza, S., J., Shariff, A., Rahwan, I., Bonnefon, J.-F. (2020) Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (5) 2332-2337. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911517117

• Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R. et al. The Moral Machine experiment. Nature 563, 59–64 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6

• Awad, E., Levine, S., Kleiman-Weiner, M. et al. Drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes. Nature Human Behaviour 4, 134–143 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8

• Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan. 2020. Crowdsourcing moral machines. Commun. ACM 63, 3 (March 2020), 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3339904

• Richard Kim, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Andrés Abeliuk, Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Iyad Rahwan. 2018. A Computational Model of Commonsense Moral Decision Making. In Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 197–203. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278721.3278770

• Noothigattu, R., Gaikwad, S., Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Rahwan, I., Ravikumar, P., & Procaccia, A. (2018). A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 32(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11512

MIT Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences thesis: Dsouza, S. (2021) Crowdsourcing moral psychology. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130838

Exhibits:

• MIT Museum (Cambridge, MA, USA)

• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York City, NY, USA)

• Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (Paderborn, Germany)

• Musée des Arts et Métiers (Paris, France)

• DOCVILLE (Leuven, Belgium)

• Design Museum Holon (Holon, Israel)

• Science Museum (London, UK)

• Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn, Germany)

• MS Wissenschaft (museum ship, Germany)

Try out the Moral Machine, the Moral Machine Classic, and the interactive dynamic country preferences visualization explorer now, at moralmachine.mit.edu, or try out only the Moral Machine country preferences visualization explorer at my repo backup here.

Explore relevant MIT Media Lab project pages on the Moral Machine here, on human+AI blame assignment studies here, on ethics of autonomous vehicles here, and on crowdsourcing of ethical decision-making here.

Find media coverage:

• Video/radio interviews of me at CGTN, NPR, and BBC World Service

• Articles about the studies at The New Yorker, Washington Post, The Economist, BBC, Nature News, MIT Technology Review, MIT News, Vox, BU Daily Free Press, Politico E&E News, Observer, Newsweek, Fast Company, Motherboard / Vice, Business Insider, Jersey Evening Post, The Guardian, Scientific American, WIRED, TRT World, Analytics India Magazine, The Verge, Spiegel, Le Monde, and Prospect

A behind-the-scenes look at the Moral Machine project can be found at Nature Social Science.

A brief presentation on an early version of the project at CODE @ MIT 2016 can be watched here.