12 July 2018

Conference on the integration of technological and social, legal and ethical research

Themed “Bringing Technology to the people” the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research takes on and realises projects dealing with Human-Machine-Interaction. All these projects aim at a humancentered development of technology that takes into

Jeroen van den Hoven; Photography: André Wagenzik

account the actual, current and urgent needs of humankind.

At the Fachkonferenz “Integrierte Forschung” we met fellow ELSI researches and developers to discuss ethical, legal and social implications of contemporary innovation. The repeated ignition of enthusiam concerning the urge to work on solutions for the challenges of today’s global society was impressive. This was appropriately represented by many examples of responsible innovation processes in Jeroen van den Hoven’s keynote on dutch technolgy development.

Session 2: Sociosensitive Systems; Photography: André Wagenzik

Of course we also presented our current research that provides an overview on interdisciplinary takes on socially appropriate behaviour. What is validated as social appropriate when, by whom and why is specific to culture, the situation, hierachies and many other frames. We approach the phenomenon of social appropriateness from viewpoints of Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Theories of Culture and many others.

Simultaniously we prepare our second step which is to investigate how the criteria accounting for the validation of behaviour as socially appropriate could be transferred to technical systems – and if or when this is something we should aim for.

Prof. Dr. Ralf Möller; Photogrpahy: André Wagenzik

Thanks to Prof. Dr. Ralf Möller of Lübeck University our audience was able to get a glimpse of how technical systems could potentially learn how to know when a certain behaviour is to be considered socially appropriate: for our Session on sociosensitive systems he spoke about Probabilistic Doxastic Temporal Logic which makes it possible to mathematically model the probability of beliefs.

We want to thank everyone wh joined, the VDI/VDE-IT and Dr. Julian Stubbe for organising this great event.

See you next time!