Registration open for Informed Experiences, Designing Consent Symposium on April 6th

Designs, whether implicitly or explicitly, cite core values that drive their development and marketing. Efficiency and profit are two common principles that push design.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent offers a space to consider centering consent as a core value of design. We invite creative individuals, researchers, ethicists, and designers, especially those with burning questions, critical theories, and insightful projects about design practices and consent, to join us for this one-day event on April 6, 2019 at Illinois Tech’s Downtown Campus (565 W. Adams). While we are talking about design and consent, we welcome people working on theoretical, reflective, and reception/audience perspectives of these concepts and encourage interested people to register for this event!

This symposium will use a “Learn, Make, Reflect” Model to interrogate the intersections of consent and design of interactive media and technologies. Here, we use panels, workshops, and discussion for attendees to prototype designs that center on consent and iterate on this process. We will provide simple prototyping materials for groups to collaborate on exploring the intersections of theory and practice in our maker-sessions.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and the HASTAC Scholars fellowship program. It is organized by Michael Anthony DeAnda, Elisabeth Hildt, Kelly Laas, and Leilasadat Mirghaderi with generous sponsorship from the Coleman Foundation.

CSEP receives NSF Funding for Ethics Education Library

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions has received funding from the National Science Foundation to continue its collaboration with the National Academy of Engineering's Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society as part of the project, "Transforming Ethics Education: Connecting STEM Faculty, Research Administrators, and Ethics Education Resources through the Online Ethics Center." As a partner, CSEP will receive $145,000 over the next three and a half years to both improve the Ethics Education Library and the Ethics Codes Collection,as well as continue to assist in expanding and improving the Online Ethics Center.

The goal of this project is to update and improve the Online Ethics Center (OEC). The investigators will do so by better engaging faculty and administrators who are new to teaching ethics, and by conducting a series of workshops with the user community that will enable them to gather multiple types of social science data and systematically assess how the OEC can better meet the needs of its constituents. Grant funds will also be used for regular site maintenance and to hire an expert external evaluator to formally assess OEC's activities and aid the investigators in improving site usability and updating the resource collection that they provide. Together, these efforts will help improve the quality of STEM ethics education and encourage and equip U.S. researchers to engage in ethical scientific practice.

Society for Neuroscience Conference William and June Pizzi Travel Award - Apply Now!

Illinois Tech undergraduate students interested in neuroscience are invited to apply for a $1,000 travel award to attend Neuroscience 2019, the Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting in Chicago. The conference is the world’s largest neuroscience conference—with more than 30,000 attendees from 80 countries—for scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system.

To apply for the travel award, please submit an abstract on the Society for Neuroscience website and send a copy to Elisabeth Hildt (ehildt@iit.edu), director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, between April 11 and May 2, 2019. Students can be part of a research team; you do not need to be the first author on the submitted abstract. The travel award is possible by a generous gift from Illinois Tech psychology alumnus William Pizzi (Ph.D. ’72).

The Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting will be October 19-23, 2019 in Chicago, IL.

Learn more about the conference and submit an abstract: http://www.sfn.org/meetings/neuroscience-2019

The travel award is made possible by a generous gift from Illinois Tech psychology alumnus William Pizzi (Ph.D. '72).

Please see the flyer  below for more details!

Congratulations to Illinios Tech's Ethics Bowl Team!

 

Congratulations to Illinois Tech’s Ethics Bowl Team members for their dedication and teamwork this semester, and an incredible performance at the Upper Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl at Illinois Tech this past Saturday. The team competed against 29 other teams from 20 schools across the Midwest, answering questions from a panel of judges about a collection of cases the students have been discussing since the beginning of the semester. 

The Illinois Tech team members who competed on Saturday are Sarah Davila (CAEE, 1^st year) and Antonio Archilla (CHBE, 1^st year). The team had incredible support from their fellow team members of QED: The Ethical Debaters, who helped in preparing for the event and running the event.

The Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is an academic competition with rules and procedures designed to model the best approaches to reasoning about practical and professional ethics. Created and developed by IIT Philosophy Professor Robert Ladenson, the IEB has spread to include well over 150 teams from all over the United States and Canada.

QED: The Ethical Debaters is a club dedicated to discussing current ethical topics in the news and has a number of events planned for next semester including movie nights, guest speakers, and mini ethics-bowl competitions. If you are interested in learning more about QED, please visit our HawkLink page, or you can join our Google Group at iitethicsbowl@googlegroups.com.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is a symposium interrogating the intersections of consent and the design of interactive media and technologies. The symposium is hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and the HASTAC Scholars fellowship program on April 6, 2019. It is organized by Michael Anthony DeAnda, Elisabeth Hildt, Kelly Laas, and Leilasadat Mirghaderi.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is a one-day event intended to bring together researchers, scholars, practitioners, and designers to consider the implications of theoretical, social, and material aspects of consent and design. Some examples of topics include: consent to participate in social media, user agreement, consent in gaming, informed consent to data collection and use, consent in digital humanities research. This workshop will consider ethical approaches to each of these respective fields of study and development. This event emphasizes theory and practice, structured on an iterative process of Learn, Make, Reflect. Here, participants will begin by listening to a panel on the topic of consent and design, then move to a group maker breakout session to design based off key concepts from the panel and return together to reflect on the process.

We invite researchers, scholars, practitioners, designers, makers, and ethicists to submit proposals for 10-15 minute presentations and to attend this event, particularly those interested in consent as it applies to:

• Ethics and philosophy 
• Informed Consent 
• Design of experiences 
• Game design and gaming culture 
• Design and study of User Experience 
• Website development 
• Application design and mobile app design 
• User Interface Design 
• Data collection 
• Digital Humanities 
• Social Media Research 
• User agreements 
• Audience studies 
• Design Research 
• Research Methods and Practices 
• Research Design 
• Storytelling and digital storytelling 
• Maker spaces and crafting

Proposal submissions should include a title, a 400-500 word abstract, and a bio of 100-150 words in length by January 31, 2019 to this form.

Any further questions may be directed to Michael DeAnda at mdeanda@hawk.iit.edu.

Call for Papers for Special Issue Of Science and Engineering Ethics

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics

Brain-Based and Artificial Intelligence: Socio-ethical Conversations in Computing and Neurotechnology

Editors: Elisabeth Hildt, Kelly Laas, Monika Sziron, Stephanie J. Bird

We are inviting papers to be included in a special issue of Science and Engineering Ethics  that seeks to explore the convergences and disparities in approaches to intelligence in neuroscience and computer science. The topic for this special issue comes from a May 2018 workshop organized by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, that reflected on how brain-based intelligence is similar to artificial intelligence (AI) and also how both can be combined in neurotechnology. Papers submitted for this special issue should explore the ethical and social implications that arise in AI and neurotechnology. Here the term “brain-based” intelligence encompasses both human and non-human animal intelligence. This special issue aims to advance an interdisciplinary discussion between scientists, practitioners, and scholars around these questions.

Both conference presenters and new authors are invited to submit an abstract for consideration.

Topics of contributions may include but are not limited to:

●    Finding a Common Language: Psychology, Neuroscience, and AI

●    Understanding Intelligence: The Physiological and the Mechanical

●    Ethics of Anthropomorphic Design and Processes in AI

●    Ethical and Social Implications of AI and Neurotechnology

●    Rights in AI and Neurotechnology: Policies, Regulations and Legislation

●    Similarities and Differences of Ethics in AI and Neuroscience

●    Science-fiction: Friend or Foe?

●    Merging of Brains and AI Technology

●    Brain-Computer Interfaces

●    Hybrid Intelligence

Submissions of up to 5,000 words are invited from the fields of neuroscience, computer science, engineering, psychology, philosophy, ethics, law, political science and social science.

Please submit an abstract (or revised workshop abstract) of up to 500 words. Abstracts are due September 15, 2018 and should be sent to Elisabeth Hildt at csep@iit.edu. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified of the editors' decision by October 1, 2018 and invited to submit a full paper. They will also receive further information regarding the formal requirements of the paper.

Full papers, of up to 5,000 words in length, double-spaced and in 12 point font are due December 15, 2018.

All manuscripts will go through the journal’s double blind peer review process.

General Information can also be found on the website of Science and Engineering Ethics (see Instruction for Authors): http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/applied+ethics/journal/11948

Facial Recognition, Values and the Human Brain

Dr. Elisabeth Hildt, Ethics Center Director, just published a blog post entitled "Facial Recognition, Values and the Human Brain on the Neuroethics Blog. 

Check it out!