Invited Talks

  • Home
  • Invited Talks

Carles Sierra

Research Professor and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
On the engineering of Social Values

Ethics in Artificial Intelligence is a wide-ranging field encompassing many open questions regarding the moral, legal and technical issues of using and designing ethically-compliant autonomous agents. Under this umbrella, the computational ethics area is concerned with formulating and codifying ethical principles into software components. In this talk, I will look at a particular problem in computational ethics: engineering moral values into autonomous agents. I will focus on the essential role of human communities in defining social values and their associated norm-based social contracts.

Dennis Nguyen

Professor for Digital Literacy and Digital Methods at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University
Generative AI and Challenges of Unfairness – Balancing Technological Potentials, Public Values & Risks intelligence

The talk is about how generative AI connects to existing and new challenges of unfairness and discrimination but also how organizations currently try to figure out how they can best make use of this technology – also in ways that can make them less dependent on Big Tech (to the extent that is feasible). Interdisciplinary dialogue, AI literacy and value-sensitive design practices play a growing role here, and I’d draw from different projects with real-life organizations (public administration/governance, education, media) involving GenAI (and other algorithmic systems) where ethical questions emerged. Moreover, engaging as academics with the field on these complex issues requires rethinking “impact” oriented research: challenges need tangible solutions that allow organisations to move forward but that is not always in line with how universities work. I may then connect to the role of interdisciplinary higher education that link technical skills with sensitivity for societal factors in the tech context (drawing on my experience in teaching MA/MSc. programs such as Applied Data Science or Data-Driven Design as well as New Media & Digital Culture).