HI Ethics Forum launched to deal with ethical aspects of research and AI

ETHICS FORUM What Does Artificial Intelligence Have to Do with Your Research? seminar launched the Hybrid Intelligence (HI) Ethics Forum on 27th of this November at the University of Oulu. HI Ethics Forum is a new venue for dealing with the ethical aspects of research with and in artificial intelligence and will be held as bimonthly event series. Ethics Forum is a part of Hybrid Intelligence (HI) Profilation 7 (2024-2028) research programme.

The seminar series will tackle core ethical questions in AI-related research, providing means for researchers to carry out their research in ethical ways as well as providing insight and understanding to the ethical dilemmas related to AI.

Ethics Forum gives a space for human-centered approach to ethics of AI

In the first seminar Susanne Uusitalo, Senior Researcher in Ethics of AI at the University of Oulu, and the coordinator of Ethics Forum, explained why Ethics Forum was created to support the research of artificial and hybrid intelligence. For example, UNESCO’s recommendation on the ethics of AI state core values and principles and follows a human-rights centered approach to ethics of AI.

“Research ethics should be action guiding. To follow the action guiding principles requires skills to identify and detect AI tools and other needed resources. In the Forum we are trying to answer the question of how to act in field of this research”, says Uusitalo.

Uusitalo refers to University Lecturer Helena Siipi´s view that there are different levels of answers regarding the action guided research ethical questions. Ethics Forum is the venue for finding these different levels in an interdisciplinary context.

The first Ethics Forum seminar What Does Artificial Intelligence Have to Do with Your Research? in a nutshell

The first seminar held on Tellus Stage at the University of Oulu included following programme:

• Opening words of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Professor of Philosophy, Director of Eudaimonia Institute, University of Oulu
  
• From Ethical Abstraction to Research Practices by Susanne Uusitalo, Senior Researcher in Ethics of AI, University of Oulu
  
• Do we need a specific AI Research Ethics in Finland? by Simo Kyllönen, University Lecturer in Research Ethics and Open Science, University of Helsinki and member of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK).
  
  Kyllönen opened with the question of whether we need a specific AI Research Ethics in Finland and continued with presenting data on the question, and mapping out the domains of research ethics, research integrity and open science.
  
• A Researcher’s View: the case of open data and methods by Leo Lahti, Professor in Data Science and research integrity advisor, University of Turku; vice chair of the national coordination on open science; member of the International Science Council's CODATA Data Ethics task group.
  
  Lahti spoke about the concept of open science from the perspective of researcher in data science. Topics covered what is science and how it is conducted when there are tensions between ethical concerns and open data captured by the phrase “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”. Lahti’s presentation clarified the key concepts in the issue.

In the end of the seminar there was a general discussion with the speakers as panelists. The seminar was open for all and organized by HI Ethics Forum in connection with Hybrid Intelligence: Human-AI Co-evolution and Learning and Eudaimonia Institute, University of Oulu.