The Sustainable Computing Lab

Ben Wagner: Governing Automation and Algorithms responsibly
2017-12-06 12:00 - 14:00 UTC | SVasili

Sarah Spiekermann: P7000: IEEE’s first standard on Ethical Systems Engineering
2017-11-29 13:00 - 15:00

Markus Sabadello: "Internet Identity: Self-sovereign ID vs. (national) eIDs”
2017-11-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Hypeneko
Historically, nation states have always played a vital role in identifying their citizens. Today, this is also reflected in the digital world, where governments issue eID cards to their own citizens (and in some cases even to foreigners, such as in the case of the Estonian eResidency program). In Austria, a number of institutions and companies (Federal Chancellery, Ministry of the Interior, Austrian State Printing House, A-Trust, etc.) provide the infrastructure for the Austrian “Bürgerkarte”, a classic centralized digital identity system which is currently undergoing a major architectural revision. At the same time, during the last few years we have been witnessing fast growing interest in decentralized, privacy-enhancing, and so-called “self-sovereign” digital identity technologies, which put individuals in control of their own digital identity, without dependencies on any state or company. In many cases (especially blockchain), the proponents of such technologies are critical of traditional authorities.
In this talk, let us look at both the different political assumptions and the different technological approaches behind “self-sovereign” identity vs. national identity, and let us explore if they are really conflicting ends of a spectrum, or if they are perhaps rather compatible and complementary.

Sabrina Kirrane: Status Update on SPECIAL
2017-11-20 11:00 - 12:00

Bernadette Kamleitner: Data Ownership
2017-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Aaron Neo

Jeffrey Sachs: AI, Ubiquitous Computing and the Question of Ethics
2017-11-09 12:00 - 16:00

Christiane Wendehorst: The ALI-ELI Principles for a Data Economy: Investment protection, data protection, and other challenges
2017-10-16 12:00 - 14:00

Christian Göbel: Scraping & online complaints platforms in China
2017-10-05 12:00 - 13:00
We look forward to a small lunch meeting on Thursday 5.10.2017 we’re organising about scraping online complaints platforms in China with Christian Göbel from the University of Vienna (http://christiangoebel.net/).

Christian will be talking about web scraping in the context of a 5-year ERC project on complaint platforms in China and will be joined by Axel Polleres & Ben Wagner for lunch in the D2 lounge at 12:00 on Thursday 5.10.2017.

Anyone who is interested in web scraping methods or studying authoritarian regimes online is very welcome to join the lunch meeting.

PrivOn2016 @ ISWC2016 - 4th International Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web - Policy and Technology
2016-10-17 09:00 - 2016-10-18 17:00

Lab Launch - Future Privacy & Data Protection in a Global Big Data World
2016-09-30 08:30 - 18:00

ITalks: Ethics & Value Based Design – Can we Create a Better Future?
2016-09-29 17:30 - 21:00

Prof. Charles Ess - "Are Good Lives Possible in a (post-) Digital Era?"
2016-05-11 12:00 - 13:30
Abstract
Are Good Lives Possible in a (post-) Digital Era?
I begin with an account of our human interests in a good life as circumscribed by shared interests in contentment, well-being, and (self-) fulfillment in relationship with others. I then ask how such good lives might be possible vis-à-vis two concrete examples of contemporary ICT instantiations: (1) “smart technologies,” including various forms of ambient intelligence and pre-emptive computing, and (2) social robots, specifically carebots and sexbots. My larger argument – drawing in part on recent approaches to ethical ICT design, including Spiekermann (2015) – is that lives of human flourishing and contentment remain possible in a post-digital era. To achieve these, however, requires that we as human beings pay greater attention to our embodied and relational lives, so as to cultivate the skills and abilities (virtues) needed to sustain human autonomy vis-à-vis increasingly sophisticated technological environments and infrastructures designed to offload our agency in the names of economic efficiency and convenience.
Bio
Charles Ess is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. He works at the intersections of philosophy, computing, applied ethics, comparative philosophy, and media studies, with specific focus on research ethics, Digital Religion, and virtue ethics in media and communication, specifically social robots. Recent publications include Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2009, 2nd ed. 2013), (co-editor) The Handbook of Internet Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and ‘What’s love got to do with it? Robots, sexuality, and the arts of being human,’ in M. Nørskov (ed.), Social Robots: Boundaries, Potential, Challenges, 57–79 (Ashgate, 2015). In 2015–16, he was a fellow of the Research Group The Ethics of Copying at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany.
