AI's growing influence in daily life has made the need for ethical, trustworthy systems a global priority. One of the most critical challenges facing society today is ensuring that AI systems, and the interactions they facilitate among humans and other agents, are aligned with human values. Aligning with human values is one of the requirements for achieving true trustworthiness. The value engineering challenge is about developing AI that identifies and understands human values, reasons about those values, and is capable of explaining behaviour in terms of those values. We argue that just as values guide our own morality, values can guide the morality of software agents and systems, bringing machine morality closer to reality. The result would be value-aware systems that take value-aligned decisions, interpret human behaviour in terms of values and enrich human reasoning by enhancing the human's value-awareness.
Today there is a growing wealth of work in the field of AI on accounting for human values and working towards value-aligned behaviour. The VALE workshop @ ECAI 2025 intends to bring in research on value engineering together and foster in-depth discussions on the topic.
We note that the VALE 2025 workshop is the third edition of the successful VALE series held at ECAI 2023 and 2024.
The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
Value representation
Value learning
Value agreements
Value conflicts
Value-driven argumentation and negotiation
Value-driven decision making
Value-driven system design
Value-alignment
Value-driven explainability
Legal and ethical questions in value and norm enforcement
(All times Anywhere on Earth (AoE), UTC-12)
Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2025
Notification of acceptance: 3 July 2025
VALE 2025 workshop: 25–30 October 2025 (to be confirmed)
Papers should be formatted according to the ECAI 2025 formatting style.
All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. They should not exceed 7 pages (not including references).
A single-blind review process will be followed, which means that papers should list the authors.
Submission instructions will be made available online very soon.
Submission of a paper is regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop in person to present their work.
Pre-proceedings will be made available on this website.
We plan to have post-proceedings published by Springer, under its LNAI series, following in the footsteps of previous editions.
ECAI 2025's ethics policy will be followed:
Research reported at ECAI should avoid harm, be honest and trustworthy, fair and non-discriminatory, and respect privacy and intellectual property.
Where relevant, authors can include in the main body of their paper, or on the reference page, a short ethics statement that addresses ethical issues regarding the research being reported and the broader ethical impact of the work.
Reviewers will be asked to flag possible violations of relevant ethical principles. Such flagged submissions will be reviewed by workshop chairs. Authors may be required to revise their paper to include a discussion of possible ethical concerns and their mitigation.