Bernd Carsten Stahl
MY BACKGROUND:
I am Professor of Critical Research in Technology and Director of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. My interests cover philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. This includes ethical questions of current and emerging of ICTs, critical approaches to information systems and issues related to responsible research and innovation.
WHY AM I INTERESTED IN RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION:
I have been working on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) for about a decade in a variety of roles. This includes four EU projects which I have coordinated or continue to coordinate. All of these projects had a direct relationship with RRI: ETICA (www.etica-project.eu) explored the role of ethics in emerging information technologies. CONSIDER (www.consider-project.eu) focused on the role of civil society organisations in designing research governance. Responsible-Industry (www.responsible-industry.eu) was the first project that specifically investigated the role of RRI in commercial organisations. My current Project SHERPA (www.project-sherpa.eu) uses RRI as the analytical framework in which to explore ethical and human rights aspects of artificial intelligence and big data analytics. Furthermore, I am the Ethics Director of the Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship Human Brain Project (HBP). The HBP Is building an ICT infrastructure for brain research. It raises a significant number of ethical and societal concerns. One of the pillars of the project is the Ethics and Society sub-project, which is based on the principles of RRI. In this sub-project I lead the ethics support activities (https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/social-ethical-reflective/ethics-support/). In addition to these European activities, I have been active in researching and developing RRI in the UK. This includes the Framework for RRI in ICT project which was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), and its successor, the Observatory for RRI in ICT (ORBIT; www.orbit-rri.org). ORBIT is currently will be spun out as a not-for-profit company in the near future and be the main vehicle for delivering the country contact information.
WHAT DO I HOPE TO LEARN / CONTRIBUTE AS COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT:
The main reason for serving in the role of UK country correspondent is that I recognise the importance of increasing our understanding and mechanisms to provide evidence of the relevance and impact of RRI. This is a question of particular importance to ORBIT which is tasked with supporting a culture of RRI across the UK EPSRC research community.
In addition, the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR) that I lead is a leading research centre in RRI and related topics in the UK with now more than 20 members, many of whom work on RRI. We fully realise the importance of further developing our networks and could operating with international partners and being part of the SUPER-MoRRI network will contribute to this goal.