Edmond Awad | Business School | University of Exeter

Dr Edmond Awad

Senior Lecturer in Economics

E.Awad@exeter.ac.uk

2535

Streatham Court 0.52

Streatham Court, University of Exeter, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4PU, UK

Overview

Edmond Awad is a Senior Lecturer at the at the University of Exeter Business School (Department of Economics) and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Edmond is also an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Humans and Machines. Edmond’s research interests are in the areas of Ethics of AI, Computational Social Science and Multi-agent Systems.

Before joining, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab (2017-2019). In 2016, Edmond led the design and development of Moral Machine, a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 4 million users, who contributed their judgements on 60 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgements over 1 million charity dilemmas. Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais.

Edmond has a bachelor degree (2007) in Informatics Engineering from Tishreen University (Syria), a master’s degree (2011) in Computing and Information Science and a PhD (2015) in Argumentation and Multi-agent systems from Masdar Institute (now Khalifa University; UAE), and a master’s degree (2017) in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Nationality: Syrian

Qualifications

Ph.D., M.Sc. (Khalifa University), M.Sc. (MIT), B.Sc. (Tishreen University).

Research

Research interests

Computational Social Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Ethics
Multi-agent Systems
Argumentation

Research projects

My research focuses on forming a clear picture of our perception of emerging technologies, on building tools that can inform consensus to overcome the social dilemmas raised by them, and on designing computational methods and paradigms to encode societal preferences in them.

Publications

Journal articles

Obradovich N, Özak Ö, Martín I, Ortuno-Ortin I, Awad E, Cebrián M, Cuevas R, Desmet K, Rahwan I, Cuevas Á, et al (In Press). Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans. SSRN Electronic Journal

Pérez J, Castro M, Awad E, López G (2024). Generation of probabilistic synthetic data for serious games: a case study on cyberbullying. Knowledge-Based Systems, 286, 111440-111440.

Jafar R, Awad A, Hatem I, Jafar K, Awad E, Shahrour I (2023). Multiple Linear Regression and Machine Learning for Predicting the Drinking Water Quality Index in Al-Seine Lake. Smart Cities, 6(5), 2807-2827. Abstract.

Franklin M, Awad E, Ashton H, Lagnado D (2023). Unpredictable robots elicit responsibility attributions. Behav Brain Sci, 46 Abstract. Author URL.

Jamison J, Awad E (2022). Computational ethics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Obradovich N, Özak Ö, Martín I, Ortuño-Ortín I, Awad E, Cebrián M, Cuevas R, Desmet K, Rahwan I, Cuevas Á, et al (2022). Expanding the measurement of culture with a sample of two billion humans. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 19(190). Abstract.

Pick CM, Ko A, Kenrick DT, Wiezel A, Wormley AS, Awad E, Al-Shawaf L, Barry O, Bereby-Meyer Y, Boonyasiriwat W, et al (2022). Fundamental social motives measured across forty-two cultures in two waves. Scientific Data, 9(1). Abstract.

Awad E, Bago B, Bonnefon J-F, Christakis NA, Rahwan I, Shariff A (2022). Polarized Citizen Preferences for the Ethical Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in 20 Countries. MDM Policy Pract, 7(2). Abstract. Author URL.

Pick CM, Ko A, Kenrick DT, Wiezel A, Wormley AS, Awad E, Al-Shawaf L, Barry O, Bereby-Meyer Y, Boonyasiriwat W, et al (2022). Publisher Correction: Fundamental social motives measured across forty-two cultures in two waves. Scientific Data, 9(1).

Saveski M, Awad E, Rahwan I, Cebrian M (2021). Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features. Sci Rep, 11(1). Abstract. Author URL.

Franklin M, Awad E, Lagnado D (2021). Blaming automated vehicles in difficult situations. iScience, 24 Abstract. Full text.

Everett JAC, Colombatto C, Awad E, Boggio P, Bos B, Brady WJ, Chawla M, Chituc V, Chung D, Drupp MA, et al (2021). Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis. Nat Hum Behav, 5(8), 1074-1088. Abstract. Author URL.

Awad E, Anderson M, Anderson SL, Liao B (2020). An approach for combining ethical principles with public opinion to guide public policy. Artificial Intelligence, 287 Abstract.

Awad E, Dsouza S, Bonnefon JF, Shariff A, Rahwan I (2020). Crowdsourcing moral machines. Communications of the ACM, 63(3), 48-55.

Awad E, Dsouza S, Shariff A, Rahwan I, Bonnefon J-F (2020). Reply to Claessens et al.: Maybe the Footbridge sacrifice is indeed the only one that sends a negative social signal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(24), 13205-13206.

Awad E, Dsouza S, Kim R, Schulz J, Henrich J, Shariff A, Bonnefon JF, Rahwan I (2020). Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles. Nature, 579(7797), E3-E5.

Awad E, Dsouza S, Shariff A, Rahwan I, Bonnefon J-F (2020). Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 117(5), 2332-2337. Abstract. Author URL.

Awad E, Levine S, Kleiman-Weiner M, Dsouza S, Tenenbaum JB, Shariff A, Bonnefon J-F, Rahwan I (2019). Drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10). Abstract.

Awad E, Dsouza S, Kim R, Schulz J, Henrich J, Shariff A, Bonnefon J-F, Rahwan I (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563 (7729), 59-64. Abstract.

Awad E, Bonnefon J-F, Caminada M, Malone TW, Rahwan I (2017). Experimental Assessment of Aggregation Principles in Argumentation-Enabled Collective Intelligence. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 17(3), 1-21. Abstract.

Awad E, Caminada MWA, Pigozzi G, Podlaszewski M, Rahwan I (2017). Pareto optimality and strategy-proofness in group argument evaluation. Journal of Logic and Computation, 27(8), 2581-2609.

Awad E, Booth R, Tohmé F, Rahwan I (2015). Judgement aggregation in multi-agent argumentation. Journal of Logic and Computation, 27(1), 227-259.

Alshamsi A, Awad E, Almehrezi M, Babushkin V, Chang P-J, Shoroye Z, Tóth A-P, Rahwan I (2015). Misery loves company: happiness and communication in the city. EPJ Data Science, 4(1).

Conferences

Zhang Y, Ling S, Awad E, Frank MR, Du N (2023). Driving Next to Automated Vehicles: Emergent Human-machine Cooperation in Mixed Traffic. CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Franklin M, Ashton H, Awad E, Lagnado D (2022). Causal Framework of Artificial Autonomous Agent Responsibility. Abstract.

Kim R, Kleiman-Weiner M, Abeliuk A, Awad E, Dsouza S, Tenenbaum JB, Rahwan I (2018). A Computational Model of Commonsense Moral Decision Making. AIES '18: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.

Noothigattu R, Gaikwad SNS, Awad E, Dsouza S, Rahwan I, Ravikumar P, Procaccia AD (2018). A voting-based system for ethical decision making. Abstract.

Booth R, Awad E, Rahwan I (2014). Interval methods for judgment aggregation in argumentation. Abstract.