Welcome to FEAR 2026
The Third International Workshop on Formal Ethical Agents and Robots (FEAR) will be held on 3 November 2026 with co-located tutorial scheduled for 2 November 2026 both at the Kilburn Building, the University of Manchester, UK.
Overview
Machine ethics, the field where most work on formal ethical agents and robots is found, is in general concerned with equipping autonomous intelligent agents with explicit moral reasoning capability. This problem offers many challenges and requires many minds form different disciplines. As part of planned activities within the Distinguished International Associates program with the Royal Academy of Engineering we would like to consolidate and enlarge the field of formal methods for machine ethics within the UK. To this end we are offering this tutorial, collocated with the The Second International Workshop on Formal Ethical Agents and Robots (FEAR)
Tutors
TBA
TBA
TBA
As autonomous agents are increasingly used in high-stakes domains like healthcare, transportation and law enforcement, aligning their behaviour with the social, legal, ethical, empathetic and cultural (SLEEC) norms of their stakeholders has become a critical engineering challenge. This short tutorial will present a tool-supported methodology for managing the SLEEC requirements lifecycle, covering elicitation, well-formedness validation, and conformance verification of agent design models.
Registration Information
This year we will hold a free one-day workshop with informal proceedings, consisting of short talks and opportunities for
discussion, and a free one-day tutorial that engages conversation in the state-of-the-art machine ethics fields.
The workshop and tutorial will be held at Atlas room, Kilburn Building, the University of Manchester.
FEAR will be a hybrid meeting, supporting both virtual and in-person attendance. We strongly encourage in-person attendance.
We encourage PhD candidates and interested academics to register via this
link.
Program Chair
Program Committee
- Kevin Baum, German Research Center for AI (DFKI)
- Joe Collenette, University of Chester
- Aleks Knoks, University of Luxembourg
- Vivek Nallur, University College Dublin
- Luca Pasetto, University of Luxembourg
- Dieter Vanderelst, University of Cincinnati
- Gleifer Vaz Alves, Federal University of Technology - Paraná
- Andrea Vestrucci, University of Bamberg
- Ajay Vishwanath, University of Bergen
