In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
Preisgeld: Platz 1: € 1000,- und Plätze 2 und 3: je € 500,-
Teilnahmeberechtigt sind Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen aller Disziplinen
Jury aus Theologie, Philosophie, Politische Wissenschaft: Kurt Appel, Martín Grassi,
Volker Kronenberg, Cornelia Richter, Jochen Sautermeister
At this conference we will undertake an interdisciplinary reconsideration of privacy, asking how we do want our society to look like based on what we saw, experienced and hopefully learned from the current present and recent past. The concerned disciplines range from different cultural and language studies, law, media studies, philosophy, political theory, psychology, sociology and surveillance studies to computer science and beyond. Contributions from bioethics, health sciences, medicine, etc. or the humanitarian sector are also welcome. The idea is to suggest a Manifesto for the Future of Privacy that can be signed by the participants. An open access publication of the conference papers is planned.
Die Corona-Pandemie stellt uns vor enorme Herausforderungen, nicht nur mit Blick auf unsere Gesundheit und unser Gesundheitssystem, sondern auch in anderen Lebensbereichen wie Politik,
Demokratie, Freiheit, Recht, Kultur, Medien, Wirtschaft, Bildung, Familie und Arbeitsmarkt. Daraus leiten sich neue Forschungsfragen ab. Durch eine Sonderförderlinie für Forschungsfragen mit gesellschafts-, sozial-, rechts-, kultur- oder geisteswissenschaftlichem Fokus rund um die Pandemie möchten wir konkrete Forschungsprojekte vorantreiben. Diese Sonderförderlinie richtet sich an alle Mitglieder der Bonner Universität, insbesondere Wissenschaftler*innen in einem frühen Karrierestadium, und ist ausgerichtet auf Projekte mit einer Laufzeit im Jahr 2022.
AI-powered recommender systems are now a ubiquitous part of our lives. The next news article we read, movie we watch, song we listen to, product we buy and social media post we see, are most likely recommended to us by an algorithm. Due to their global and fast spread in the last decade, both legal and philosophical research has yet to explore implications that recommender systems have for our lives in a digitalized society. The European Commission, in its Proposal for a Digital Services Act, defines ‘recommender system’ as fully or partially automated system used by an online platform to suggest in its online interface specific information to recipients of the service. Recommender systems determine relevance for users, oftentimes using personal data and profiles to determine the relative relevance of recommended content. The ever-changing technological landscape requires a detailed philosophical and ethical analysis to both evaluate existing legislation and shape future regulatory measures.
The use of recommender systems gives rise to various philosophical questions. How can relevance be defined? Whom are recommendations benefitting? More fundamentally, how should we
understand the concept of a recommendation? This understanding will feed into an ethical framework for recommender systems which mitigates the widespread harms associated with them.
These harms include: exposing children to inappropriate content, personal information being inferred by others who see which items get recommended to a particular user, reducing choices
offered to users, and recommending items in a way that is unfair to particular groups of users. Developing a systematic ethical framework for recommender systems will help those designing them to reduce these harms. The respect of ethical guidelines in the framework at design stage can be part of legal instruments, such as a certification. Other possible legal approaches include sector-specific regulation of recommender systems concerning, for example, news or online marketplaces. Sectorspecific (national) paths to the regulation of recommender systems are to be analyzed in comparison to the proposed EU Digital Services Act, which - in its current version - barely scratches the surface of the regulatory need associated with recommender systems. It limits the regulation of recommendation systems to large online platforms, which then have to provide transparency and choice of options for users.
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering 2 further Forum Humanum fellowships, to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate the complex relationships between individuals, institutions and societies. They aim to develop a new perspective on micro-phenomena (e.g. development of personality, competences, individualization) as well as macrophenomena (e.g. world society, globalization). One of many central research goals is to identify key factors that influence social cohesion, equal opportunities, efficiency, resource protection and the development of individual skills in the context of all these factors.
Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.
Von welcher Bedeutung eine multiperspektivische Herangehensweise an zentralen Zukunftsthemen und die gemeinsame Entwicklung sowie Bearbeitung von inter- und transdisziplinären Fragestellungen ist, wird gegenwärtig jeden Tag aufs Neue deutlich: Die Corona-Pandemie stellt uns alle vor enorme Herausforderungen, nicht nur mit Blick auf unsere Gesundheit und unser(e) Gesundheitssystem(e). Auch hinsichtlich Politik, Ökonomie, Sozialleben, Kultur, Recht, Bildung, Familie, Demokratie, Freiheit, Arbeitsmarkt, Medien etc. kommen täglich neue Fragen auf – Fragen, die im komplexen Wechselspiel zwischen Individuen, Institutionen und Gesellschaften verortet sind und die wir in wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Hinsicht nur gemeinsam angehen können.
Zur Schärfung und Weiterentwicklung ihres wissenschaftlichen Profils hat die Universität transdisziplinäre Forschungsbereiche/ Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRAs) etabliert. Als neuartige, innovationsfördernde Organisationsstrukturen richten die TRAs die universitäre Forschung auf zentrale wissenschaftliche, technologische und gesellschaftliche Zukunftsthemen hin aus. Sie dienen als kreative und explorative Plattformen, auf denen sich Fächer und Fakultäten themenorientiert verbinden und ihre strategische Entwicklung koordinieren.