• Speaker: Barbara J. Grosz, Harvard, USA
• Moderator: Erich Prem, eutema & TU Wien, Austria

About the Event

September 22, 2020
5:00 – 6:00 PM
(17:00) CET

Abstract

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.

Video

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