About

Digital Ethics Lab

The Digital Ethics Lab aims to open discussion around subjects related to ethics and technology, and build an international “support circle” for students looking for ethics by design in their digital projects. A series of conferences will be organized each semester, bringing to the table experts from the industry and research institutions. The seminars main focus is analysis of the dynamics between research, business, privacy and ethics.

The discussion subjects for the academic year 2020-2021 are:

Open data for government and science
Ethics and AI
Humanity of Digital Anthropocene
Right to disconnect, possible in times of remote working/learning?

Illustration by Soledad Li, M1 Master student Digital Sciences track

Events

Topics for seminars planned during 2020-2021 academic year:

Open Government, Trust, Ethics in e-democracy

Topics of discussion:

Open Government and Pandemic: transparency and accountability as way towards confidence, participative epidemiology, clarity of statistics, lack of data fiability from Health International System;
Open Government and election: What about Cambridge analytica scandal? 4 years after? Why nobody talked about the digital risks (and external influence) during this presidential campaign?
Data of covid: polemics around “Stop covid “;
Transparency and Oxfam.

Ethics and AI

Public policy of AI and Ethics: how to make a good balance between economic competition and human interests ?

Ethics and Open Source

Open Scienc and publishing: open data transforming the modalities of open research.

Robots Virtualization and Ethics

Emotions, UX design for patients, and not only for doctors and nurse, power of lobbies and laboratories, question of the patient benefit.

Ethics and Digital Accessibility

The level of accessibility;
Accessibility and empowerment for civic and scientific education.

What defines Ethics in Digital Age?

Ethics

refers to the codes, norms, and procedures that govern everyday life and interaction, civility, and exchange in institutions, societies, and cultures (Dewey, 2008).

Digital ethics

is defined as a normative principles for action and interaction in digital environments (Luke, 2018). It focuses on the relationship between the creation, organisation, dissemination, and use of information, and the ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct in society.

In 1992 the sociologist Ulrich Beck in his book "The Risk Society: Towards a new modernity" introdused the concept of risk society which addresses the growing nature of uncontrollable risks and the increase of uncertainty in the way individuals construct understanding of social processes and questions pertaining to it (Beck et al., 1992). The questions which digital ethics studies seek to estimate what impacts technologies and digitalization will have on our social reality and to bring to the public the risks they could induce.

References:

Beck, Ulrich, Scott Lash, and Brian Wynne. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Vol. 17. sage, 1992.

Dewey, John. The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 7, 1925-1953: 1932, Ethics. Vol. 7. SIU Press, 2008.

Luke, Allan. "Digital ethics now." Language and Literacy 20.3 (2018): 185-198.

Team

Sophie Pène , Founder of Digital Ethics Lab, former Director of Master AIRE

Liliana Baquero, Cofounder of Digital Ethics Lab, Scientific coordinator Digital Sciences track

Amodsen Chotia, Deputy director FDVA department, Director master Digital Sciences

Yuliia Nikolaenko, Research intern Digital Ethics Lab