Program fPET 2024

Welcome to the preliminary program for the 2024 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET 2024). Here we share the initial schedule of presentations, panels, posters, and experimental sessions that will take place during the conference.

Preliminary Program Overview

We have made every effort to accommodate the preferences and scheduling requests submitted by participants. Please note that Room A will host all hybrid presentations. If you applied in time for an online presentation, your talk has been scheduled in this room.

Updated Preliminary Program: Download PDF

Please check this page regularly for updates and further information as we finalize the program. We are committed to ensuring that fPET 2024 is a productive and enriching experience for all attendees.

Poster Session - List of Posters

Michael Mayer, Bettina Kamm, Jan Rabold: Approaches to Increasing Explicit Opportunities for the Acquisition of Professional Ethical Competencies in Higher Education
Nick Treanor: The Epistemic Role of Testing and Certification in the Construction Industry
Florian Richter: From Human-System Interaction to Human-System Co-Action: Ethical Assessment of Generative AI
Elisabeth Does: Ethics in Transdisciplinary Research Formats: Reflection Guidelines for Responsible Research Practice in Real-World Labs
Anja Bodenschatz: Does the Implementation by Autonomous Systems Make Randomization in Ethical Dilemmas More Acceptable?
Maximilian Schultz: And now we're doing such an AI project: On the State of Non-Governmental Organizations' Engagement with Artificial Intelligence - Opening a New Field of Research
Johannes Willem Heesbeen: Design Practice as a Test-Bed for Institutional Logics
Oliver Shuey: What can Post-Phenomenology Tell Us about Engineering Knowledge?
Katja Nau, Christoph Steinbach, Harald F. Krug, Dana Kuehnel, Alexis Bazzanella, Matthias Finkbeiner, Jessica S. Hoffmann, Andreas Mattern: MANTRA - Data on Innovative Materials for Sustainability and Transfer
Andreas Lösch, Janine Gondolf, Christian Büscher, Ulrich Ufer: Transformation Assessment – Observing and (Co)Shaping Sociotechnical Transformations
Christine Boshuijzen - van Burken, Deane Baker, Ned Dobos, Milad Ghasri, Erandi Hene Kankanamge, Twan Huybers, Oleksandra Molloy, Jo Plested, Shreyansh Singh: Understanding Ethical Implications of AI Enabled Decision Support Systems on the Battlefield
Anna Jacyszyn: AI4DiTraRe: How significant and Influential Artificial Intelligence is in the Digital Transformation of Research? A Multilevel Interdisciplinary Approach
Johanna Teresa Wallenborn, Maximilian Roßmann: Myths of Sustainable AI Futures - A Multimodal Metaphor Analysis

Art Exhibitions

These two art exhibitions were submitted as experimental sessions for fPET24.

Mark Bessoudo: Google Street View: Ethics, Creative Freedom and the Future of Street Photography

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
— Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books, 1974

Google Street View is a popular online mapping tool integrated with Google Maps that provides users with a 360-degree street-level view of city streets, back alleys and dirt roads around many parts of the globe. While it provides users with unprecedented utility, it also raises some unique philosophical questions about ethics, creative freedom and the future of technology.

Google compiles their Street View image database by using their own proprietary vehicles mounted with special cameras which collect images every few meters. Billions of photos are then stitched together to create a vast visual library capturing the elements of the built environment: people, buildings, signage and infrastructure. Like more traditional street photography, Street View serves as a time capsule into public life by capturing the banal and mundane moments of everyday ordinary life in the process: a roadside market in Daka, Senegal; the densely packed Shibuya district of central Tokyo; humble mountain villages of Bhutan; tiny chapels in fishing outposts dotted along the Greenland coast.

It is for this reason that Google Street View has amassed a legion of fans. But it also raises some unique philosophical questions about ethics and creative freedom.

If using Google Street View as a surrogate for “street photography”, are the screenshots captured from it a form of aesthetic consumerism? After all, “to photograph people is to violate them,” claimed the cultural critic Susan Sontag in her 1977 classic On Photography. “It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” Are millions (billions?) of people “symbolically possessed” by Google’s Street View database?

Furthermore, has creative freedom simply been outsourced to an algorithm? Art is always a balance between the tensions of freedom and constraint. With Street View photography users have ultimate freedom in that they can visit almost any street on Earth, but are limited to capturing only what Google’s cameras have – for example, you cannot achieve better lighting, get a different angle or wait for a more interesting subject to wander into frame. You must work with what you’ve been given.

This experimental art exhibit will explore the nature of these ethical and creative questions. Through a series of Google Street View “photographs” that I have compiled from around the world, this exhibit will invite viewers to consider the ethical implications not just of traditional street photography and Google Street View of the past and present, but of the coming (and inevitable?) introduction of far more advanced and intrusive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, drone photography and 24/7 mass surveillance.

While Sontag’s observations were meant as a critique of the growing aesthetic consumerism of the 1970s her criticism still resonates, perhaps even more so today: “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

Carolina Ibarra Castro: Art Exhibition about Ethics, Autoperception and Representation of Indigenous Peoples in Image Generation Programs with Artificial Intelligence

This artistic exhibition seeks to make visible the biases and prejudices of representation and the digital self-perception of indigenous peoples within the digital landscape generated by an artificial intelligence and machine learning language model, programs where the user introduces a prompt or description in natural language, and from where an image emerges from an artificial intelligence model.

With a focus between engineering philosophy - centered on the algorithm - and STS studies, this work addresses the digital self-perception by users of indigenous peoples in machine learning programs and, in turn, the cultural biases and prejudices that images from these programs, such as Gencraft, Dall-E and other open access programs, promote reflection from the hypothesis that for the global south, colonialism continues in the digital world, while it is from the north that are generated the data models and algorithms that shape an image of Latin America, just like the drawings of explorers from the early 19th century.

The exhibition exhibits visual material from the interaction with indigenous communities in Chile and images generated by artificial intelligence programs. It is composed of at least 10 small screens with testimonies and data visualizations on the one hand, in accordance with the ZKM exhibitions, and printed images as photographs, with the proposal - not yet realized - of objects that function as visualizations of 3D data. This exhibition is part of a digital ethnography study to investigate how generative art platforms interpret and generate visual content when provided with some keywords, to explore how concepts about the notion of Latin American indigenous communities are interpreted.

Usually, and as has been discussed with local communities, indigenous representation in programs like Gencraft is cartoonish. By unpacking the biases present in generative art, we aim to foster a more inclusive, culturally sensitive, and equitable approach to AI-driven creative expression.