We Robot 2023

View Program

Please contact lawevent@bu.edu with any questions.

We invite submissions for the 12^th annual robotics law and policy conference—We Robot—to be held at Boston University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 29-30, 2023. Currently we are planning for an in-person event but are also exploring ways to allow for some remote participation. A pre-conference workshop will also be held on September 28, 2023 across the river at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We Robot 2023 seeks contributions by North American and international academics, practitioners, and others, in the form of scholarly papers, technological demonstrations, or posters. Hosted over the years by the law schools of Miami, Washington, Yale, Stanford, and Ottawa, We Robot fosters conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots and the people who shape or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate. Our thoroughly interdisciplinary program committee particularly encourages papers with co-authors from different fields.

If you would like to request an extension for your abstract, please email lawevent@bu.edu with the subject “Extension.”

Scholarly Papers

We invite abstracts for scholarly papers on a range of topics related to the legal, policy, ethical, economic, social, or cultural aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence. We encourage you to peruse our eleven years of previous conferences for examples of successful papers.

• We Robot 2022 (U. Washington)
• We Robot 2021 (U. Miami)
• We Robot 2020 (U. Ottawa)
• We Robot 2019 (U. Miami)
• We Robot 2018 (Stanford)
• We Robot 2017 (Yale)
• We Robot 2016 (U. Miami)
• We Robot 2015 (U. Washington)
• We Robot 2014 (U. Miami)
• We Robot 2013 (Stanford)
• We Robot 2012 (U. Miami)

How to Propose a Paper. Papers should be submitted through the conference submission portal. Proposers will need to provide:

1. Title of the proposed paper and an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words. Submitters are cautioned that proposals that exceed the length limit will be rejected unread. In addition (not counted in the word limit) please provide a list of up to 5 key references that you refer to in the paper that will help us understand how to situate your paper in the relevant literature;
2. Please do NOT put any names or biographical information in your uploaded proposal. However, on a separate sheet, please – again without your name(s) or the name(s) of institutions or corporations – list the current title of each contributor (e.g. “Ph. D candidate in Mechanical Engineering” or “Associate Professor of Anthropology” or “Chief Technologist at Robotics Startup”). We are asking for this information because in past years we have sometimes struggled to determine whether proposers had the experience or disciplinary breadth to deliver on certain types of ambitious proposals; purely blind submissions did not, for example, allow us to tell if submissions were by one person or a group.
3. To preserve blind review, please do not ask members of the program or review committee to review draft abstracts in advance of submission.

Note on EasyChair submissions: We ask that you please fill in both the required abstract text box and upload a separate pdf of your abstract for initial submissions, in addition to including a separate page with the title of each contributor (as noted above). If you have any issues with using EasyChair, please email lawevent@bu.edu with any questions.

We will waive conference fees for all authors of accepted papers if the full paper is submitted on time.  In addition, subject to funding availability, we intend to provide for domestic air travel (or, if necessary, at least partial funding for international air travel), plus lodging, for one paper presenter provided the full paper is submitted by the due date.