Current Projects

AITE investigates which epistemological and scientific standards Artificial Intelligence must meet in order to be considered explainable and which ethical standards it should fulfill in order to be considered trustworthy.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Trustworthiness and Explainability

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The project aims to prevent a failure of the drinking water supply due to insufficient available water quantities in Germany. By developing a situation-dependent customer (group) specific regulation of water quantities using AI technology, a contribution is to be made to securing the water supply in everyday situations and crisis.

Keywords: security ethics, critical infrastructure, AI, water, digitalisation

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AUPIK therefore starts at the intersection of the work of home care services and structures of disaster control. Ultimately, AUPIK aims at strengthening the resilience of home care infrastructures in situations of crisis and disaster.

Keywords: resilience, home care, disaster management, security studies

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In the DAMA project, a meta-assistant is being developed to enable users to control their smart homes. The aim of DAMA is to create transparency of shared data and increase the autonomy of the users.
Keywords: Privacy, Autonomy, Data Sovereignty, Smart Home, IoT

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Digitalisation is changing social coexistence in a diverse, in some cases fundamental way. The aim of digilog@bw at the Ethics Centre is to identify the influence of digitisation on individuals and society from an ethical point of view and to contribute to responsible problemsolving. Thus, the foundations for value-oriented digital change will be developed on the basis of public dialogue events and in an inter-disciplinary network.

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The Edilife project aims to reflect on current services in the context of the digital afterlife industry, to anticipate future developments, to characterize required actions, and to develop possibilities for future actions.

Keywords: digital afterlife, memory culture, culture and ethics of death, IT security, law

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In technology development projects, a process-accompanying investigation of ethical, legal and social issues should take place, according to the basic idea of the BMBF's Integrated Research funding concept. The ESTER project of the Integrated Research cluster deals with this research mode and analyzes the ethical and social aspects that it entails. Together with representatives of relevant disciplines, practice partners from targeted fields of application, users and funding agencies, proposals are being developed on how these aspects can be included in the further development of integrated research.

Keywords: Responsible Innovation, ELSI, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, Governance

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In modern societies with widespread usage of digital media, private information can be disclosed on many occasions. The co-development of technical possibilities like data mining and genetic diagnostics, and political regulation (e.g. data retention, biometric databases, body scanners) on the one hand, and the individual use of social networking sites, online shopping, or location based services on the other hand establish a tight mesh of information. This enables the ever more encompassing and detailed tracking of individuals’ lives. The “Forum Privacy and Autonomy in the Digital World” considers these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together scholars from Law, Sociology, Computer Science, Psychology, Economics and Ethics.

Keywords: privacy, self-determination, digital transition, media

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The project aims at improving the preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations by means of providing integrated tools to support efficient response planning and the building of realistic multidisciplinary scenarios. The project will design and develop a system for improving response planning strategies and scenario building and facilitating organisational coordination among many actors (firefighting units, medical emergency services, police departments, civil protection units, command and control centres). The Ethics Centre will provide a human factors analysis, a societal acceptance and ethical acceptability analysis and an ethical issues analysis in cooperation with the end users involved in the project.

Keywords: security ethics, human machine interaction, crisis situation, civil protection, first responders

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LOUISA (Learning Model for Multidimensional Quantitative Movement Analysis) is a project funded by the German federal ministry for research and education (BMBF). Musculoskeletal (MSK) diseases represent one of the main health risks in the workplace that result in chronic pain that significantly reduces the quality of life to those affected and can lead to disabilities. The aim of LOUISA is to motivate and support people in the workplace. Employers actively prevent and improve employees' MSK health in order to keep people healthy.

Keywords:

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The separation of ethnic groups in some urban neighbourhoods is regarded as a safety-relevant risk factor. The migsst project will review this assumption through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary research approach.

The subproject at the IZEW questions the so-called "parallel societies" and investigates the potentials of modern communication in multi-ethnic cities.

Keywords:

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The NIKA project is aimed at the development of generic interaction patterns for social robots in the home of elderly people. These patterns can be used across different robot platforms to support elderly people in an active, self-determined lifestyle in their own home environment. A library of interaction patterns will be designed, implemented and tested, from which the appropriate pattern for the respective situation will be selected according to the user's needs profile, support needs and context.

Keywords: Assistive Robotics, Social Robotics, Human-Machine-Interaction, Robot Ethics, Ethics of Old Age

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The PEGASUS project deals with the use of machine learning based software solutions in the fight against organised crime. The aim of the project is to carry out ethically informed accompanying research in close cooperation with technical and legal partners in order to define normative guidelines and framework conditions for an acceptable use of technology.

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RESIK is obliged to the notion of planning for that, which can’t be planned for. The project is meant to be a contribution to the building and assuring of hospital functionality in times of crisis. One of its tasks is to lay the foundations for temporary decentralisation of medical and caring structures in case of emergency. In this context the hospital is regarded as a node in a network of miscellaneous public health and security organizations. For the model region Krefeld RESIK analyses the complex structure, identifies existing vulnerabilities related to crisis and develops strategies to enhance the resilience of hospitals as central parts of public health infrastructure.

Keywords: resilience, Security, Health, Hospital, Ethical acceptability

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The project WeNet deals with diversity-aware artificial intelligence and tries to improve computer-mediated social interaction by developing new methods and algorithms. The goal is to develop an online platform, which is based on this diversity-aware computer-facilitated mediation of communication. Within the project, the IZEW investigates ethical aspects of privacy and data protection and develops a conceptual framework of diversity to inform the development algorithms.

Keywords: ethics, artificial intelligence, algorithm, human-computer interaction, communication

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