EGAIS
Description
The EGAIS (Ethical GovernAnce of emergIng technologieS) project is a 3 year project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (Science and Society) that aims to address some of the problems discussed in the computer ethics and information ethics fields by investigating the consideration of ethics within research and development projects from the perspective of ethical governance procedures.
Given the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on all aspects of life today, including ethical and social impact, it appears important to consider potential ethical issues before and during information technology development. As ICT becomes more complex and invisible to the user (as envisioned in the concepts of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence) and converges with other new and emerging technologies the potential for ethical impact increases. At the same time the ability to anticipate these effects by the proposers of the technology projects can be more difficult (due to the complexity and convergence issues).
This project investigates how, and where, 'ethical reflexivity' (i.e. the consideration of the potential ethical aspects of the technology) could be incorporated into the research and technology development culture of European Commission funded research, so that these considerations become a more natural part of the proposal evaluation and technical development processes.
To achieve this EGAIS will develop assessment strategies to observe the impact of ethical reflexivity within and after the project, and will actively take into consideration the insights, suggestions, relevant problems and feedback gained directly from key stakeholders (decision makers, European policy makers, leaders of technical projects, developers, IT industry, academics and researchers in ICT, the scientific community, the civil society) through a series of workshops.
See also
- Technology
- Technology development
- List of emerging technologies
Project partners
The EGAIS project is coordinated by the Universita Cattolica’s Research Centre on Innovation, Technologies and Financial Services (CeTIF), Milan (Italy), and is supported by academic partners from:
- Middlesex University, London (United Kingdom)
- Facultes Universitaires Notre Dame de la Paix, Namur (Belgium)
- Institut Catholique des Arts et Métiers, Lille (France)
- Institute of Information Science, Maribor (Slovenia)