Publications related to Ethics

Voices from the Frontline: Revealing the AI Practitioners' viewpoint on the European AI Act

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in an ever larger number of industries. Alongside this development, however, abundant works argue that AI-driven systems are lacking in terms of safety, ethics and transparency. As a direct consequence, the ...

2024

The impact of different methods of increasing the intensity of compassion in engineering ethics cases

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Despite the growing interest in emotions in engineering education, empirical research on incorporating them into engineering ethics education is limited. Therefore, we designed this experimental study to assess how different methods for integrating compass ...

2024

A multimodal measurement of the impact of deepfakes on the ethical reasoning and affective reactions of students

Touradj Ebrahimi, Patrick Jermann, Roland John Tormey, Cécile Hardebolle, Nihat Kotluk, Vivek Ramachandran

Deepfakes - synthetic videos generated by machine learning models - are becoming increasingly sophisticated. While they have several positive use cases, their potential for harm is also high. Deepfake production involves input from multiple engineers, maki ...

2023

DRONE GAME THAT HIGHLIGHTS ETHICAL AND SUSTAINABILITY IMPLICATIONS OF DESIGN DECISIONS

Siara Ruth Isaac, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Gianni Lodetti, Barbara Bruno

This paper reports on the development of a brief scenario-based challenge to prompt engineering students’ reflection about the broader impacts of their design decisions, and thereby increase their ethical sensitivity and motivation. The game scenario asks ...

CDIO conference proceedings2023

Explainability as fig leaf? An exploration of experts’ ethical expectations towards machine learning in psychiatry

The increasing implementation of programs supported by machine learning in medical contexts will affect psychiatry. It is crucial to accompany this development with careful ethical considerations informed by empirical research involving experts from the fi ...

2023

Minding Rights: Mapping Ethical and Legal Foundations of 'Neurorights'

Marcello Ienca

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty - often framed as ...

CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS2023

Compassion and Engineering Students’ Moral Reasoning: The Emotional Experience of Engineering Ethics Cases

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Background: There has been an increase in interest in emotion in engineering and science ethics education. There is also evidence that emotional content in case studies may improve students’ learning and enhance awareness, understanding, and motivation con ...

American Society for Engineering Education2023

A WAY TO GET STUDENTS TO CONSIDER ETHICS AND SUSTAINABILITY IN IOT PROJECTS

Sustainability and ethical topics can be embedded and assessed in existing technical courses within an engineering curriculum. This article describes how we integrated a reflection on the importance of ethical and environmental aspects of connected objects ...

2023

Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrain

The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting Hybrid Minds focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain- ...

2023

Sustainability and Ethicality are Peripheral to Students’ Software Design

Bryan Alexander Ford, Siara Ruth Isaac, Pierluca Borsò, Aditi Kothiyal

The conceptual design phase is a fascinating moment to observe how a design task is interpreted, as the (often implicit) relative importance students accord to the various requirements and constraints offers a window into the thinking underpinning their de ...

Tempus Publications2023

What is the role of ethics in accreditation documentation from a global view?

Helena Kovacs

Ethics in engineering has long been an important element in engineering programmes, however these subjects are often taught at a basic learning level with little attempt to connect to demonstrative learning outcomes. In recent years there has been a step c ...

University Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC)2022

A Game-Based Approach to Develop Engineering Students’ Awareness About Artificial Intelligence Ethical Challenges

Patrick Jermann, Roland John Tormey, Cécile Hardebolle, Helena Kovacs, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Maria Carla Di Vincenzo, Ester Simkova

The past few decades have seen important efforts to introduce more ethics into engineering education programs around the world, while adapting to the evolution of ethical concerns, notably in relation to digital technology and artificial intelligence. Even ...

2022

Emotional empathy and engineering students’moral reasoning

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Although engineering education is often characterized as a rational activity, research suggests that emotions are vital for learning at all levels of education. In ethics education, there is evidence that including mild emotional information in case studie ...

2022

Health data privacy through homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger computing: an ethical-legal qualitative expert assessment study

Marcello Ienca

Background: Increasingly, hospitals and research institutes are developing technical solutions for sharing patient data in a privacy preserving manner. Two of these technical solutions are homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger technology. Homomorph ...

BMC2022

Specchio-COVID19 cohort study: a longitudinal follow-up of SARS-CoV-2 serosurvey participants in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland

Stéphane Joost, Idris Guessous

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has affected billions of people around the world both directly through the infection itself and indirectly through its economic, social and sanitary impact. Collecting data over time is essential for the understanding of ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2022

A Canvas for the Ethical Design of Learning Experiences with Digital Tools

Denis Gillet, Patrick Jermann, Roland John Tormey, Cécile Hardebolle, Adrian Christian Holzer, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Pascal Felber

The use of digital tools has drastically increased in engineering education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These tools generate important ethical issues, in particular in terms of privacy and fairness. However, very few teacher training programmes ...

2022

What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

Helena Kovacs

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are also expecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughout engineering pr ...

Technische Universität Berlin2021

Construct Validity of Unobtrusive Measures of Organizational Ethical Climates

Christine Choirat, Sayan Sarkar

Prior studies have examined the relationship between organizational ethical climates and an array of work-related attitudes and behaviors. However, current research is hampered by the lack of knowledge on how ethical climates relate to organizational outco ...

2021

Institutions and Incentives in Knowledge Production and Diffusion: From Science to Innovation

Charles Chadi Ayoubi

This thesis presents four essays providing novel empirical and theoretical insights on the incentives and institutional structures that favor knowledge production and diffusion. The first two studies analyze these processes in the realm of scientific resea ...

EPFL2020

Ethics in Research

Science is in revolution. The formidable scientific and technological developments of the last century have dramatically transformed the way in which we conduct scientific research. The knowledge and applications that science produces has profound conseque ...

2019