Hiroshi Hosobe

Hiroshi Hosobe is a Full Professor of Digital Media in the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan. His main research interests are in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, particularly constraint programming and other mathematical approaches to user interfaces and information visualization. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and received Best Paper Awards at the PRIMA2003 and IV2018 international conferences.

The project

Title: Constraint Programming for Ethical Reasoning

"The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting much attention. This requires various ethical issues to be considered in the development of AI-based systems including, for example, privacy, manipulation of behavior, opacity of systems, and bias in decision making. To tackle this problem, Taheri et al. proposed a framework for ethical decision making, and formalized several important aspects such as how to organize ethical norms, how to evaluate choices according to such norms, how to aggregate such evaluations for classes of norms, and how to decide the best choices for the entire norms. In addition, Satoh and I integrated Taheri et al.’s framework with Borning et al.’s constraint hierarchy framework to enable the powerful constraint-based modeling of problems for making decisions by using ethical norms. Its main advantage is that ethical norms can be represented as soft constraints and can be combined with other kinds of hard constraints to model problems. In this research project, I enhance constraint programming for ethical reasoning by collaborating with Dr. Bourgne at the Computer Science Laboratory (LIP6) of Sorbonne University, which I believe is appropriate and promising since Dr. Bourgne is one of the supervisors of Taheri's PhD thesis. More specifically, I am planning to perform the following three things. First, I explore different approaches to the treatment of ethical norms. Second, I extend my basic framework to treat variable-size problems. Finally, I develop a constraint programming system that integrates these enhancements and show its usefulness by conducting computational experiments and also by applying it to more real-world problems."

Hosting Institution: Sorbonne Université

Selective Bibliography

• Tomoya Yumishita and Hiroshi Hosobe, "A Japanese Software Keyboard Using Visualization to Promote Positive Text Input", in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2025), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 15768, pp. 121–132, Springer, 2025.
• Reika Endo and Hiroshi Hosobe, "Visualization of Time Series Data Using Clustered Heatmaps and Line Graphs", in Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI2024), No. 25, pp. 1–8, ACM Press, 2024.
• Hiroshi Hosobe and Ken Satoh, "A Soft Constraint-Based Framework for Ethical Reasoning", in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART2024), Vol. 3, pp. 1355–1362, SciTePress, 2024.
• Hiroshi Hosobe and Ken Satoh, "Binary Search-Based Methods for Solving Constraint Hierarchies over Finite Domains", in Proceedings of the 35th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI2023), pp. 186–193, IEEE Computer Society, 2023.