WELAI
2025 Edition
Workshop on Ethical and Legal Aspects of AI
Tuesday 16 December 2025, Cambridge (UK)
https://www.bcs-sgai.org/ai2025/?section=workshops
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co-located with the
Forty-fifth SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
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Background and Goals: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field in continuous development and more recently has become more prominent in the news. The pros and cons of its use in various contexts and the possible impact on society is now more openly discussed. There are significant components of AI that cause concern to experts and to the public in general. This is especially true in regard to the use of unregulated AI in safety-critical applications. There are also potential problems emerging from AI being used in many other systems without sufficient transparency regarding how and to what end it is used. These concerns and problems call for the need to properly regulate the development and use of AI in order to ensure its safety and conformity with human-centric values. This workshop brings together colleagues interested in, or actively trying to develop, solutions to protect society from the negative uses of AI, especially in the context of exploring legal and ethical aspects (including regulatory compliance, trustworthy AI, responsible AI, and AI governance).
The Workshop will combine discussion and debate opportunities with presentations of technical work through papers. One objective is to agree on community initiatives which may help with the regulation of AI developments at a national or international level.
Areas of interest: include, but are not limited to, the following:
• AI Regulation
• Privacy and Data Protection
• AI and Copyright
• Liability
• Mitigation of Bias and Discrimination
• System Transparency
• System Explainability
• Responsibility and Accountability
• Correctness by Design
• System Certification
• Accuracy and Robustness
• Trustworthy and Responsible AI
• AI Governance
• Decision-Making
• Human Rights
• Moral Agency
• Value Alignment
• Environmental Sustainability
Keynote
t.b.a.
Program Committee
George Bargiannis (U. of Huddersfield, UK)
Andrea Bertolini (U. di Pisa, Italy)
Tracey Cockerton Tattersall (Ravensbourne University, UK)
Pedro Miguel Freitas (Catholic University, Portugal)
Gizem Gültekin-Varkonyi (University of Szeged, Hungary)
Francisco Herrera (University of Granada, Spain)
Phan Quoc Nguyen (Vietnam National University, Vietnam)
Vladimir Trajkovik (Ss Cyril and Methodius U., R. of N. Macedonia)
Goran Vojković (University North, Croatia)
Vahid Yazdanpanah (University of Southampton, UK)
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Workshop Chairs
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Assoc. Prof. Dr Carlisle George
Research Group on Aspects of Law & Ethics Related to Technology
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Prof. Juan Carlos Augusto
Research Group on the Development of Intelligent Environments,
Department of Computer Science, Middlesex University London, UK
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Call For Papers
Publications: there will be no official Proceedings, however we will organize a way to share them to facilitate discussion and will have a copyright notice. All papers accepted will be also encouraged to take part of a Special Issue of the Journal of Smart Cities and Society. More instructions will be given during the event and the event itself will be a source of constructive feedback towards preparing the papers for the journal Special Issue. This is optional and presenting a paper at the workshop does not commit in any way to submit it to the Special Issue. Equally there is no financial commitment when having the article included in the Special Issue.
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Paper Formatting Guidelines: the ideal submissions expected are papers of 8-10 pages using the format of papers published in the journal, see examples here. Currently only LaTeX templates, are available but submissions can also be made using MSWord resembling that format. Other submissions are also considered, for example one page abstracts, however due to the limited time available, if we cannot accomodate all then priority will be given to the more substantial submissions. Similarly, we can consider online presentations however, in the event of having to make decisions based on number of presentations priority will be given to those participating in person.
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Submission link: please use this link to our CMT submission point
The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.
Submission Guidelines for CMT:
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Here is a link to create the account: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/docs/help/general/account-creation.html
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Here is a link for authors on how to submit a paper: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/docs/help/author/author-submission-form.html
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Deadline for submission:
Paper submission deadline: 15th of July, 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30th of September, 2025
Final Version deadline: 15th of October, 2025
Workshop date: Tuesday 16 December 2025
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Authors Guidelines: The workshop is open to everyone with an interest in the confluence of the technical topics of the event. Attendees who are not presenting papers are also very welcomed. All attendees need to register for the workshop as per the conference requirements.