International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW)

Research Focus Media Ethics, Philosophy of Technology & AI

The research focus Media Ethics, Philosophy of Technology & AI undertakes interdisciplinary research into ethical and philosophical issues raised by information technologies as media and tools of a digital society. The focus is currently on philosophical concepts and questions of ethics in the digital society in relation to data, privacy, children's rights in the digital world, artificial intelligence, digital afterlife, metaverses and media ethics issues in (online) journalism and social media.

Current Projects

  • Educational Materials for Teachers: Ethics of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence
  • IZEW-UNC: Scientific Cooperation and Partnership between the Universities of Tübingen and North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Edilife: Ethics, Law and Security of Digital Afterlife
  • Forum Privacy: Forum Privacy and Self-Determination in a Digital World
  • Plattform Lernende Systeme: Germany’s Platform for Artificial Intelligence of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)
  • SIKID: Children's security in a digital world
  • A list of completed projects can be found in the archive section.

Selected Publications and Project Outcomes

  • Baur, Andreas (2024), „European Dreams of the Cloud: Imagining Innovation and Political Control”, in: Geopolitics 29(3), 796–820. doi:10.1080/14650045.2022.2151902
  • Heesen, Jessica et al.: Künstliche Intelligenz im Journalismus. Potenziale und Herausforderungen für Medienschaffende. Whitepaper aus der Plattform Lernende Systeme, München 2023, https://doi.org/10.48669/pls_2023-1
  • Baur, Andreas (2022), „Grenzenlosigkeit in Grenzen. Zur Politik globaler Cloudinfrastrukturen“, in: Politikum 8 (2), 44 - 49. doi:10.46499/2032.2377.
  • Heesen, Jessica (2021), Responsible freedom - regulation of online media as democratic challenge. In: Lada Trifonova Price/Karen Sanders/Wendy N. Wyatt (ed.): Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics, London/New York: Routledge 2021, 433 - 440.
  • Theilen, Jens T./Andreas Baur/Felix Bieker/Regina Ammicht Quinn/Marit Hansen/Gloria González Fuster (2021), „Feminist data protection: an introduction“, in: Feminist data protection (special issue), Internet Policy Review 10(4). doi: 10.14763/2021.4.1609
  • Schelenz, Laura (2021): Diversity-aware Recommendations for Social Justice? Exploring User Diversity and Fairness in Recommender Systems. In Judith Masthoff, Eelco Herder, Nava Tintarev, Marko Tkalčič (Eds.): Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP '21: 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. Utrecht Netherlands, 21 06 2021 25 06 2021. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 404 - 410. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450614.3463293
  • Pawelec, Maria/Kerstin Schopp/Jessica Heesen (2021),Information Justice in Africa – Insights on Information Ethics Connected to Nelson Mandela's Thinking. Coetzee Bester/Johannes Britz/Rafael Capurro/Rachel Fischer (ed.): Nelson Mandela. A Reader on Information Ethics. International Centre for Information Ethics (ICIE) 2021 (), 87 - 132.
  • From Principles to Practice. An interdisciplinary framework to operationalise AI ethics, Artificial Intelligence Ethics Impact Group (AIEIGroup), VDE/Bertelsmann Stiftung, Creative Commons 2020.

Completed Projects

A list of completed research projects pursued by the Research Focus Media Ethics and Information Technology can be found in the archive section.