Our events

Prof. Burkhard Schafer gave an HFDT Lecture on October 16, 2023 on the topic"When sorry is the hardest game to play, - Wittgenstein, robotics-apologies and the law".

About the lecture:

Apologies play a central role in restoring trust. Apologies also play a central role in law - in the criminal justice system of many countries, an apologizing offender can expect a reduced sentence, while corporate lawyers often discourage employees from apologizing as it can be construed as an admission of guilt. Increasingly, their power is also being recognized by HCI researchers, who are giving machines the ability to "say sorry" under certain conditions. But what are we to make of machine apologies? Are they merely a form of deception that mimics human apologies, but should not receive the same reception, let alone legal recognition? Or are there ways in which machine apologies can be considered valid speech acts, at least under certain conditions? This talk draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his thoughts on psychology, theology and linguistics, to understand robotic apologies and draw some tentative conclusions for their legal and ethical implications.

About the speaker:

Burkhard Schafer is Professor of Computational Legal Theory at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the SCIPT Centre in IT and IP Law. He studied logic, philosophy of science, computational linguistics and law at the Universities of Main, Munich and Lancaster before joining the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. His research interests include the use of technology in the law (legal informatics/legal informatics) and the legal regulation of technology (IT law, information law), both from an interdisciplinary and comparative legal perspective. He has been Pi or Co-I on projects funded by FP7, EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC and Nordforsk totaling over £12 million, most recently RCUK funded a major R&D cluster 'Creative Informatics' supporting the use of data science for individual artists and creative industry businesses in Scotland.

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler gave an HFDT Lecture on 17 June 2021 on the topic "Religion as Communicative Figuration. Transformations of religious communication in times of profound mediatization".

About the lecture:

In times of profound mediatization, religious actors also use digital media to (re)present and negotiate their religious identity. Therefore, on the one hand, media reflect cultural and social construction processes and their changes; on the other hand, they also shape, change or create these constructions themselves. But how do communicative practices change in times in which actors live in a qualitatively and quantitatively expanded media environment and are confronted with trends of profound mediatization such as datafication or increased connectivity through media? From an actor-centered perspective, the question will be to what extent this has an impact on the understanding of religion. The lecture will address the question of how we can determine and analyze the relationship between the transformation processes of religion and media on different levels from the perspective of both religious studies and communication studies. He will present current discussions and theoretical contributions on the subject of "profound mediatization" and "communicative figurations" and discuss them on the basis of three case studies from the Roman Catholic Church. The fundamental question is how we can determine and analyze the relationship between the transformation processes of religion and media on different levels.

About the speaker:

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, Prof. Dr., is a professor in the field of "Literatures and Media of Religions" at the Institute for Religious Studies and Religious Education at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on mediatization and religion, recent Catholicism, ritual theory, and religion and video gaming. Recent publications: "Handbook for Religion and Journalism" Routledge 2020 (co-edited with X. Zeiler), "Mediatized Religion in Asia: Studies on Digital Media and Religion" Routledge 2019 (co-edited with X. Zeiler), "Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion." Routledge 2018 (together with V. Sisler & X. Zeiler). She is also editor of the online journal GAMEVIRONMENTS.

April 27, 2020, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

About the lecture:

Technology assessment (TA) is a relatively young concept of interdisciplinary, scientific policy advice. On the one hand, it is about understanding the interdependencies of technology (development) and society, on the other hand, it is about understanding and analyzing technology development and, in particular, building on this to provide political and social advice. In this lecture, the main features of TA will be presented and made tangible using concrete examples.

Questions such as "What topics does the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) deal with?"; "What methodological concepts and instruments does TA work with?" or "Who are the addressees and how can they best be reached?" will be addressed and answered using examples from ITA practice.

About the speaker:

Walter Peissl is Deputy Director of the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). He was one of the first employees of the ÖAW's Research Center for Technology Assessment, which was founded in 1988, and has been working on issues at the interface of technology, society and politics ever since. His work focuses on the new information society, digitalization, privacy protection and methodological issues of technology assessment. However, he has already worked on or led projects in practically all ITA subject areas.

Details of projects and publications:
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/das-ita/das-ita-team/d/walter-peissl/

October 22, 2019, 10:00-12:00 a.m.

About the lecture:

The development of robots and their use in the world of work is progressing. Due to the technological progress of recent decades, robots increasingly have functions that enable them to learn from experience, make decisions and move in more complex environments. In the future, these features should help robots to shed their primarily tool-based role and work together with humans in a wide variety of contexts to provide a service or manufacture a product. Trust plays a key role in such close cooperation between humans and robots. The lecture therefore explores the extent to which trust is a relevant category in human-robot collaboration and which factors influence human-robot trust.

About the speaker:

Bettina Kubicek is Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Graz. In her research, Prof. Dr. Bettina Kubicek deals with the intensification, flexibilization and robotization of work. Specifically, she investigates the effects of intensified work demands as well as temporal and spatial flexibility on the well-being, motivation and learning of working people and the role of personal and organizational resources in dealing with these demands. She is currently leading research projects on the topics of "cognitive demands of flexible work", "boundary management between work and private life" and "trust in human-robot interaction". She is also setting up an interaction laboratory to research collaborative human-robot relationships.

May 10, 2019, 8:30-10:00 a.m.

About the lecture:
Data-carrying technologies have successfully found their way into the classrooms of this world today (e.g. smartphones, search engines or social media). These are now - at least in part - highly complex agents with artificial consciousness that process information and link it on different levels and with different communities of interest. But: hasn't consciousness always been a quality that we have actually reserved for humans? What does it mean when the trust we place in integrated information carriers (especially since the advent of the Internet of Things) changes our values? Things that we consider partially unacceptable in an analog world - especially when it comes to our privacy - are becoming more and more accepted digitally. What impact will our trust in intelligent systems have when we integrate them into our education systems and when learning is no longer a quality exclusive to humans? In this talk, Otrel-Cass discusses the need to rethink by also reinterpreting the interconnections between technical and human systems, and how research should deal with these entangled relationships ethically, scientifically and culturally.

About the speaker:
Kathrin Otrel-Cass is a professor at the Institute for Pedagogical Professionalization at the University of Graz. Over the past two decades, she has worked in New Zealand and Denmark on the interface between people and technology, especially in schools. Using a techno-anthropological approach, she has attempted to take a critical look at the introduction of technology into schools and what this could mean for our idea of education. Her book Hyperconnectivity and digital reality: Towards the Eutopia of being human (Springer) was published in 2019.

May 8, 2019, 3:30-5:00 p.m.

About the lecture:

Information technologies (IT) have permeated large parts of our everyday lives. In the early days of IT, we were still very aware of where IT was being used, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to assess. We trust IT when it comes to cancer detection, braking in the car, the autopilot in an airplane, recommending the best restaurant or product, and so on. But what does trust actually mean in the context of IT and how can we measure it?
In business informatics, research focuses on the interaction between people when they perform tasks in business situations using technology. With the help of design science research, technology artifacts are developed and evaluated with people in their contexts. Trust in technology plays a central role here.
The lecture will present the view of business informatics on trust and the conceptualization in design science research. Current challenges of the concept of "trust" in embedded technologies and artificial intelligence applications will be discussed. Likewise, the transfer of the concept of trust to software agents, which can then trust other software agents.

About the speaker:

Stefan Thalmann is a professor at the University of Graz and head of the Business Analytics and Data Science Center - Max Jung Laboratory (BANDAS Center). Previously, he led a research group on Cognitive Decision Support at the Pro2Future research center and worked as a post-doc at Graz University of Technology and the University of Innsbruck. As a business information scientist, he investigates the use of data-based technologies in business, as well as their impact on work and society.

April 3, 2019, 13:00-15:00

About the lecture:

Tim Cole draws a comparison between the American Wild West, which was characterized by lawlessness, the law of the jungle and the resulting monopolies of the so-called "robber barons", and today's Internet, which is just as dominated by a handful of GAFA monopolies (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) that use our data to their heart's content, shamelessly exploit their power and thus cause immeasurable damage to society in the long term.

In his book "Wild Wild Web", he argues for a 'civilization' of the internet. It is time to rethink, to stop taking the development of the digital transformation in business and society for granted and to stop accepting the exploitation of our data without resistance. But without a new, digital ethic, we will stumble disoriented into the digital age. It is high time to act.

About the speaker:

Tim Cole is a German-American internet publicist, columnist and author. He is co-founder and editor of the blog Czyslansky, which specializes in digital culture, and editor-in-chief of the business magazine Smart Industry, which focuses on the "Internet of Things". His latest books are "Wild Wild Web: What the history of the Wild West teaches us about the future of digital society" and "Digital transformation: why the German economy is currently sleeping through the digital future and what needs to be done now!".

The research network organized a symposium on 19 June from 15:30 to 20:00 in HS 111.21, Beethovestraße 8, 8010 Graz.

Further details on the event can be found here.

The research network organized a symposium on 29 June from 10:30 to 15:00 at Meerscheinschößl, Mozartgasse 3, Graz.

You can find the program here.

The research network organized a symposium on 22 June from 15:15 to 17:00 in HS 111.21 in Beethovenstraße 8, 2nd floor, Graz.

You can find the program here.

The research network organized the HFDT Symposium again on 18 January 2021 from 13:00 to 17:00.
Link to the program: Program

January 23, 2020, 9:00-13:00
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Festsaal im Meerscheinschlössl, Mozartgasse 3

The event offers an introduction and overview of the activities of the research network and the doctoral program The program is accompanied by a poster presentation of research and dissertation projects and offers researchers and students the opportunity to network on the topic of digital transformation

to the program

HFDT Symposium on 9.11.2018

With the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European Commission wants to establish a public data archive that corresponds to the values of Open Science. First and foremost, this means that scientific research, data and results should be freely accessible. At the symposium, the Human Factor in Digital Transformation research network will look at the basic ideas of EOSC and discuss the possible consequences for universities, libraries and scientific work.

Venue: HS 01.15, Karl-Franzens-University Graz

Time: Friday, 9.11.2018, 13:00 to 17:30

to the program