Events
Summer 2025 Workshop
Organizers: John Basl, Kathleen Creel, Ron Sandler
Time Period: June 2ndt to July 31st, 2024
Location: RP 909
Information: This summer school is intended for graduate students with advanced training in applied ethics, ethical theory, philosophy of science, or other areas with potential research applications to AI and big data who would like to develop research capacities in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), data ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Designing AI and machine learning systems to promote human flourishing in just and sustainable ways will require a robust and diverse AI and data ethics research community.
Link to Program Website.
Organizers: Vance Ricks & Meica Magnani
Time Period: July 20st – July 25th 2025
Location: RP 310
Information: The Summer Training Program on Responsible Computing Education will spread robust, quickly deployable responsible computing education to a more diverse range of schools. For ten days, a cohort of two- person interdisciplinary teams who teach at minority-serving institutions interested in building responsible computing curricula will learn about strategies used at other institutions. The program will provide opportunities to learn, discuss, and exchange educational and institutional know-how. Participants will develop concrete plans for programs suited for their own institutions.
Link to Program Website.
This program is generously funded by the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge.
Upcoming Speaker Events:
Ethics Institute Speaker, Matt Haber
Time: 3pm – 4:30pm
Location: Renaissance Park 4th floor common room
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
About the Speaker: Matt Haber is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.
Ethics Institute Speaker, Sahar Heydari Fard
Time: 3pm – 4:30pm
Location:Renaissance Park 4th floor common room
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
About the Speaker: Sahar Heydari Fard is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University.
Ethics Institute Speaker, Richard Pettigrew
Time: 3pm – 4:30pm
Location:Renaissance Park 4th floor common room
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
About the Speaker: Richard Pettigrew is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.
Ethics Institute Speaker, Matthew Willis
Time: 3pm – 4:30pm
Location:Renaissance Park 4th floor common room
Title: “Epistemic Dirty Work”
Abstract:This paper reveals a tension between familiar standards of epistemic responsibility and the demands of socially distributed inquiry. Many of our guiding epistemic norms – do not believe without sufficient evidence, do not assert what you do not know, defer to expert consensus, conciliate in the face of reasonable peer disagreement – are framed as invariant constraints on responsible epistemic conduct. When we evaluate agents one by one, violations of these norms appear straightforwardly blameworthy. Yet collective epistemic success sometimes depends on agents who flout them – agents who engage in what I call epistemic dirty work. Epistemic dirty work are practices or forms of inquiry that, while normatively suspect from a perspective devoid of social context, play an indispensable role in sustaining the health of distributed systems of knowledge production. Given this tension, my aim is to show that theories of epistemic responsibility must be sensitive to social role and network dynamics as normatively relevant features of inquiry. What counts as epistemically responsible cannot be determined solely by agent-neutral, individualistic standards. It also depends on the roles agents occupy within broader systems of inquiry.
About the Speaker: Matthew Willis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University.