Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications fundamentally impact individuals, the environment, and society as a whole. Many applications of this disruptive technology pose ethical challenges for developers, policy-makers, and society. This leads to an increasing awareness that AI systems must be aligned with human values, ethics, and laws. Furthermore, it strengthens the need for universities and research institutes to foster responsibility, reflexivity, and sensitivity to the ethical challenges of AI that are and can be at stake in scientific conduct. Ethics and AI meet in various ways: it generates novel ethical concerns specific to AI (think of explainability versus opacity, accountability, perpetuating bias, threat to human autonomy, etc.); requires AI tailored policy-making (think of the EC Ethics Guidelines, the UNESCO’s recommendation on the ethics of AI, and ethics advisory boards in industry and academia); and necessitates the implementation of formal reasoning with norms and values (e.g., formalizing legal reasoning and policy) as well as standards and guidelines for participatory design processes (e.g., IEEE Standard for value-based design). The field is by its very nature interdisciplinary, demanding close collaboration between computer scientists, policy makers, social scientists, and philosophers. This SIG will bring together experts from various disciplines in addressing questions concerning AI ethics.

Kees van Berkel

Kees van Berkel is an Assistant Professor AI Ethics at the Institute for Logic and Computation at TU Wien. He has a background in practical philosophy (philosophy of agency, ethics, and meta-ethics) as well as logic and computer science. His core research lies in the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and symbolic AI (especially logical methods in knowledge representation in reasoning). It includes the development of logical methods for reasoning with normative systems, the study of norm explanations in AI through formal dialogue models, the logical and philosophical analysis of meta-ethical principles, and the modelling of conflict-resolution methods for norm and value conflicts. A shared characteristic of these topics is the interdisciplinarity of the research, addressing problems and questions that require close collaboration between experts from various fields, including the humanities, law, computer science, and mathematics. As of 2024, Kees is part of the cluster of excellence program Bilateral AI (BILAI) (research module “Ethical AI Systems”), investigating AI alignment and Explainable AI, focusing on dialogical reasoning with values, norms, and ethical principles.

Sabine Köszegi

Sabine Theresia Köszegi is a Labor Science and Organization Professor at the Institute of Management Sciences at TU Wien and Academic Director of the Executive MBA Innovation, Digitization and Entrepreneurship at the TU Continuing Education Academy. She holds a PhD in Social and Economic Sciences and a venia docendi in Business Administration from the University of Vienna. She is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research lies at the intersection of technology, work, and organisation and has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. In 2020, she was awarded the Käthe-Leichter State Prize for outstanding achievements in gender research. Since 2017, Sabine Theresia Köszegi has also been involved in scientific policy advice as Chair of the Austrian Council for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, and as a member of the Future of Work Working Group of the European think-tank Bruegel. She is chairing the UNESCO Advisory Board on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Austria and is a member of the Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence for the Austrian Government as well as on the AI Advisory Board for the City of Vienna.

Marjo Rauhala

Marjo Rauhala (Dr.Phil., MSSc., BA) is the Head of Service Unit of Responsible Research Practices at TU Wien and responsible for establishing the research ethics advisory and review structures for the university. With an academic background in philosophical and biomedical ethics and social sciences, Marjo Rauhala has broad experience in the field of research ethics. This experience encompasses academic research, ethics management and advisory tasks in interdisciplinary engineering projects, collaboration with a national ethics council, as well as research ethics review in the research funding programs of the European Union. Since 2012, Marjo Rauhala participates as an independent expert in the European Commission’s working groups on ethics policy and guidance and expert panels in ethics screening, review and check/follow-up of European funded research for the European Commission’s Ethics and Integrity Sector and the European Research Council. Marjo Rauhala is the co-author of the European Commission’s Guidance note on “Ethics in Social Science and Humanities”, the policy document “Identifying serious and complex ethics issues in EU-funded research”, and the Austrian Guideline “Best Guidance for Research Integrity and Ethics”. Most recently, Marjo Rauhala participated in the European Commission working group on the “Living Guidelines for Responsible Use of GenAI in Research”.