Upcoming Events:
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Jan 26, 2021 5:00 – 6:30 PM (17:00) CET |
Lecture Series “Digital Superpowers and Geopolitics”
In Cyberspace, the modern “colonial powers” are not nations but multinational companies, mostly American but with strong competition emerging in China. These companies control the digital platforms central to most peoples’ social networks, communications, entertainment, and commerce and, through them, have collected and continue to collect limitless information about our friends, colleagues, preferences, opinions, and secrets. With the knowledge obtained by processing this information/data, these companies have built some of the world’s more profitable businesses, turning little pieces of information given to them by uninformed users in return for “free services”, into extremely valuable, targeted advertising. These companies, moreover, endeavor to operate in the space between countries, with very limited responsibility/ accountability to governments. At the same time, governments such as in China and the US have laws requiring such companies to divulge data obtained from their customers anywhere in the world. Does this pose a threat to national or European sovereignty? Panelists: June Lowery-Kingston (European Commission), Jan-Hendrik Passoth (ENS / Viadrina, Germany), Michael Veale (University College London, UK) Moderator: James Larus (EPFL, Switzerland) |
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Feb 2, 2021 5:00 – 6:00 PM (17:00) CET |
Lecture Series “Freedom of Expression in the Digital Public Sphere”
A substantial portion of contemporary public discourse takes place over online social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Accordingly, these platforms form a core component of the digital public sphere, which, although subject to private ownership, constitute a digital infrastructural resource that is open to members of the public. Speaker: Sunimal Mendis (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) Respondent: Christiane Wendehorst (University of Vienna, Austria) Moderator: Erich Prem (eutema & TU Wien, Austria) |
Past Events:
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Dec 15, 2020 5:00 – 6:00 PM (17:00) CET |
Lecture Series Julian Nida-Rümelin (LMU München, Germany) “Philosophical Foundations of Digital Humanism”
In this talk Julian Nida_Rümelin will develop the main features of what he calls ‘digital humanism’ (Nida-Rümelin/Weidenfeld 2018), based on a general philosophical account of humanistic theory and practice (Nida-Rümelin 2016): (1) preconditions of human authorship (JNR 2019); (2) human authorship in times of digital change; (3) ethical implications.
Moderator: Edward A. Lee (UC Berkeley, USA) |
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Nov 19-20, 2020 4:00 – 6:45 PM (16:00) CET |
Workshop “Strategies for a Humanistic Digital Future” |
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Nov. 3, 2020 5:00 – 6:30 PM (17:00) CET |
Lecture Series “Ethics and IT: How AI is Reshaping our World”
This panel debate will investigate the development of AI from a philosophical perspective. In particular, we will discuss the ethical implications of AI and the global challenges raised by the widespread adoption of socio-technical systems powered by AI tools. These challenges will be addressed by the three speakers from different cultural and geographical perspectives. We invite the audience to be part of the debate to increase with the panel our understanding how AI is reshaping the world and the awareness of the challenges we will face in the future. Deborah G. Johnson (University of Virginia, USA), Guglielmo Tamburrini (University of Naples, Italy), Yi Zeng (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) Moderator: Viola Schiaffonati (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) |
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Oct. 20, 2020 5:00 – 6:00 PM (17:00) CEST |
Lecture Series Elissa M. Redmiles (Microsoft Research) “Learning from the People: Responsibly Encouraging Adoption of Contact Tracing Apps” A growing number of contact tracing apps are being developed to complement manual contact tracing. Yet, for these technological solutions to benefit public health, users must be willing to adopt these apps. While privacy was the main consideration of experts at the start of contact tracing app development, privacy is only one of many factors in users’ decision to adopt these apps. In this talk I showcase the value of taking a descriptive ethics approach to setting best practices in this new domain. Descriptive ethics, introduced by the field of moral philosophy, determines best practices by learning directly from the user — observing people’s preferences and inferring best practice from that behavior — instead of exclusively relying on experts’ normative decisions. This talk presents an empirically-validated framework of the inputs that factor into a user’s decision to adopt COVID19 contact tracing apps, including app accuracy, privacy, benefits, and mobile costs. Using predictive models of users’ likelihood to install COVID apps based on quantifications of these factors, I show how high the bar is for these apps to achieve adoption and suggest user-driven directions for ethically encouraging adoption. Moderator: James Larus (EPFL, Switzerland) Slides |
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Oct. 06, 2020 5:00 – 6:30 PM (17:00) CEST |
Lecture Series Paul Timmers, Ciaran Martin, Margot Dor, and Georg Serentschy “Digital Sovereignty – Navigating Between Scylla and Charybdis”
This panel debate will have a hard and critical look at the sense and nonsense of digital sovereignty.
Moderator: Lynda Hardman (CWI – Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam and Utrecht University) Slides – Paul Timmers; Slides – Margot Dor |
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Sept. 22, 2020 5:00 – 6:00 PM (17:00) CEST |
Lecture Series Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard, USA): “An AI and Computer Science Dilemma: Could I? Should I?” Computing technologies have become pervasive in daily life. Predominant uses of them involve communities rather than isolated individuals, and they operate across diverse cultures and populations. Systems designed to serve one purpose may have unintended harmful consequences. To create systems that are “society-compatible”, designers and developers of innovative technologies need to recognize and address the ethical considerations that should constrain their design. For students to learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology, computer science curricula must expand to include ethical reasoning about the societal value and impact of these technologies. This talk will describe Harvard’s Embedded EthiCS program, a novel approach to integrating ethics into computer science education that incorporates ethical reasoning throughout courses in the standard computer science curriculum. It changes existing courses rather than requiring wholly new courses. The talk will describe the goals of Embedded EthiCS, the way the program works, lessons learned and challenges to sustainable implementations of such a program across different types of academic institutions. This approach was motivated by my experiences teaching the course “Intelligent Systems: Design and Ethical Challenges”, which I will describe briefly first. Moderator: Erich Prem (eutema & TU Wien, Austria) |
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September 8, 2020 |
Lecture Series Stuart Russell (University of California, Berkeley, USA): “How Not to Destroy the World with Artificial Intelligence!“ I will briefly survey recent and expected developments in AI and their implications. Some are enormously positive, while others, such as the development of autonomous weapons and the replacement of humans in economic roles, may be negative. Beyond these, one must expect that AI capabilities will eventually exceed those of humans across a range of real-world-decision making scenarios. Should this be a cause for concern, as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have suggested? And, if so, what can we do about it? While some in the mainstream AI community dismiss the issue, I will argue that the problem is real and that the technical aspects of it are solvable if we replace current definitions of AI with a version based on provable benefit to humans. Moderator: Helga Nowotny (Chair of the ERA Council Forum Austria and Former President of the ERC) Slides |
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July 14, 2020 | Lecture Series “Corona Contact Tracing – the Role of Governments and Tech Giants” Alfonso Fuggetta (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), James Larus (EPFL, Switzerland) Moderator: Jeff Kramer (Imperial College London, UK) |
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June 9, 2020 | Lecture Series Moshe Vardi (Rice University, USA): “Lessons for Digital Humanism from Covid-19” |
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May 14, 2020 |
Workshop “Digital Humanism: Informatics in Times of COVID-19” |
![]() | April 4, 2019 | Workshop “Vienna Workshop on Digital Humanism” |