Description project
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can nowadays be found in virtually all domains, be it healthcare (Esteva et al., 2017; Bouton et al., 2016; Marr, 2017), marketing (Huang and Rust, 2021), public services (Haeck, 2024), social services (Patel, 2024) and others. AI, a system predominantly based on Machine Learning (ML), can generate output based on the input it receives to detect (Ambika, 2024), predict (Bera et al., 2022), recommend (Zhang et al., 2020), and more. With the contribution AI has made in these various domains, however, existing literature has also testified that this rise of AI implementation comes with new problems as well (Teo, 2024), especially from an ethical point of view (Petrozzino, 2021). The overarching goal of this research is to support the development of more ethical AI systems. Our focus is to understand and support the process of anticipating ethical issues before they occur or quickly resolve occurring ones.
Moreover, the purpose of this research is to learn about the trajectory of ethical issues within AI software development teams. We want to understand the timeline of how the ethical issues were identified and eventually resolved, or when and why they were not resolved. Together with AI software developers, we will build a tool/package on this basis that supports the developers’ ethical reflection, and associated action, throughout the software development process. This will be accomplished through in-depth interviews (group and individual), as well as active collaboration with the developers.
Expected outcomes
There is no research yet on how AI software developers reflect on socio-technical interactions and potential ethical consequences of their work, nor about how they can be motivated to feel responsible for these issues and find ways of how to deal with them. This project will study how such reflection and learning processes happens in practice to build a model that can be employed in the development of a practical support tool. This tool will be in the form of an ethical reflection tool for the developers that assists them in implementing ethical principles into their working practices. This approach will integrate the “ethical by design” concept, which encourages practical ethics to be included into every phase of the software development process (Nurock et al., 2021).
involved researchers
| dr. Sebastian DennerleinAssistant Professor |
Duration of the project
April 2024 – April 2028
Funding & partners
Starter Grant, partners with IT:U
External project website & LinkedIn
Will come later
Publications related to this project
Will come later