Events
DigHum Lecture
Event Start Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - 5:00 pm
Event End Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - 6:00 pm
Topic: “An AI and Computer Science Dilemma: Could I? Should I?” (scroll down for abstract and CV)
Speaker: Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard, USA)
Moderator: Erich Prem (eutema & TU Wien, Austria)
To participate go to:
https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)
The talk will be streamed and recorded on our DIGHUM channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-oCPW9l7IuDvu_J30tqMVw
For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://www.informatik.tuwien.ac.at/dighum/lectures-program/
Abstract of the talk:
“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.
Short Bio of Barbara J. Grosz:
Barbara J. Grosz is Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.
Her groundbreaking contributions to Artificial Intelligence include pioneering research in dialogue processing and in theories of multi-agent collaboration and their application to human-computer interaction. Recent research has explored ways these theories can improve computer system design for health care coordination and science education. Professor Grosz co-founded Harvard’s Embedded Ethics program, which integrates teaching of ethical reasoning into core computer science courses. She is known for leading roles in the establishment and leadership of interdisciplinary institutions and contributions to the advancement of women in science. Grosz received the 2009 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, the 2015 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, and the 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.
She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society, and fellow of several scientific and multi-disciplinary societies.