After more than a year of work and a review of more than 3000 sources, the OID is launching its first meta-analysis. The report is set to provide a global understanding of the current structure of the information and communication space and its impact on public debate and democracy around the world.

Eliot Borenstein ist Professor für Russistik und Slawistik an der New York University. Unter seinen vielfach ausgezeichneten Publikationen zur politischen Medienkultur Russlands finden sich zuletzt »Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture« [2007], »Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism« [2019] und »Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power« [2020]. Demnächst erscheint seine Monographie zu viralen Netzphänomenen in Russland mit dem Titel »Meanwhile in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video«. Borenstein ist zudem Herausgeber des Blogs »All the Russians« für das NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia«.

Why is it so hard to get rid of unhealthy behavior? According to the theory of behavioral health economics, unhealthy behaviors are partly due to cognitive biases that adversely affect decision-making. The corresponding public health strategy is to identify these biases and design interventions that address them. Based on practical examples like diabetes management or physical activity, we discuss successful health promotion strategies based on the combined insights of economics and psychology.

This event is organized by the Department of Socioeconomics

Prof. Burkhard Schäfer (University of Edinburgh, Professor of Computational Legal Theory)

Opening Remarks by Prof. Enrico Schleiff (President of Goethe University)

Opening Remarks by Prof. Rainer Forst (Speaker of ConTrust and Normative Orders)

Welcoming Remarks & Comment Prof. Klaus Günther (Dean of the Faculty of Law Goethe University)

Convenors: Prof. Christoph Burchard (Goethe University, Professor of Criminal Justice, PI of ConTrust and "Normative Orders") and Prof. Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann (Goethe University, Professor of Public Law, PI of ConTrust)

Presented by:

Forschungsverbund "Normative Ordnungen" der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, "ConTrust" - ein Clusterprojekt des Landes Hessen, Frankfurter Gespräche zum Informationsrecht des Lehrstuhls für Öffentliches Recht, Umweltrecht, Informationsrecht und Verwaltungswissenschaften und Zentrum verantwortungsbewusste Digitalisierung

The Workshop is organised by Stephanie Ettmeier and Marie Huber, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Global History at the HU Berlin. Taking our own research projects – dealing with the postcolonial economy of Francophone West Africa, and the recovery of the German economy from the Great Depression under the Nazis from 1933 onwards, respectively – as a starting point, we want to invite others working on economic experiences and expectations to discuss these questions with us. In a critical thinking and discussion focused workshop format, we want to strengthen interdisciplinary conversation and provide methodological impulses for a broad range of research topics.  

Keynote Lectures

Ute Röschenthaler, Universität Mainz, will give a keynote lecture and provide valuable input during the discussions.

Iyad Rahwan is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and leads the Center for Humans and Machines. He is also an honorary professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin. Until June 2020, he was an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rahwan holds a PhD in Information Systems (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the societal impact of artificial intelligence and social media. In addition to various journal articles, Iyad Rahwan is co-author of the study Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles and together with Jean-François Bonnefon he published the paper Machine Thinking, Fast and Slow (both 2020).

The event will be held in English.

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev is a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa (Israel), of which he was president for many years; research in social philosophy, perception theory, and everyday psychology; numerous publications on the historical and contemporary politics of emotions, including "Love Online: Emotions on the Internet" (2004), "The Logic of Emotions. A Critique of Emotional Intelligence" (2009), "The Arc of Love. How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time" (2019).

Introduction and talk: Ethel Matala de Mazza

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev is professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa (Israel), of which he was president for many years; research in social philosophy, perception theory, and everyday psychology; numerous publications on the historical and contemporary politics of emotions, including "Love Online: Emotions on the Internet" (2004), "The Logic of Emotions. A Critique of Emotional Intelligence" (2009), "The Arc of Love. How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time" (2019).

In her lecture Joanna Bryson will argue that there are really only two problems humanity has to solve: sustainability and inequality, or put another way: security and power. Or put a third way: how big of a pie can we make, and how do we slice up that pie? Life is not a zero-sum game. We use the security of sociality to construct public goods where everyone benefits. But still, every individual needs enough pie to thrive, and this is the challenge of inequality. Joanna Bryson will argue that understanding these processes answers the questions above. She will then look at how AI is presently affecting both these problems.

Joanna J Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence, its nature, and its consequences. She advises governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs globally, particularly in AI policy. She holds two degrees each in psychology and AI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT). Her work has appeared in venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. She continues to research both the systems engineering of AI and the cognitive science of intelligence, with present focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and new models of governance for AI and ICT.

It was announced with some fanfare that Alexa and others would soon demonstrate breakthroughs in the field of emotion analysis. Much is written about affective computing, but products are far from market ready. For example, Amazon’s emotion assistant Dylan is said to be able to read human emotions just by listening to their voices. However, Dylan currently only exists in form of a patent.

So far, Amazon, Google et al. have not launched such products. Identifying unique signals that indicate that someone is sad seems to be a bit more complicated than they initially thought. Maybe someone’s voice sounds depressed because they are depressed, but maybe they are just tired or exhausted.

However, these difficulties do not prevent other companies from launching products that claim to have solved these complex problems by using voice and speech for character and personality analysis.

In Germany, two examples spring to mind. One is the company Precire, based in Aachen, a city on border with Belgium. Their idea: you record a voice sample, and based on the person’s choice of words, sentence structure and many other indicators, the software then produces an analysis of their character traits. The software can be used in staff recruitment or to identify candidates for promotion.

The company states that its software carries out the analysis based on a 15-minute language sample. The then CEO Mario Reis stated in an interview in 2016 that the results were based on science and scientifically tested. This statement is repeated in a book published in 2018. This book also cites additional studies and findings to further support the scientific grounding of the method.

By Veronika Thiel

The Leopoldina and the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) will organize the symposium “Global Mental Health in the Era of Sustainable Development: Research and Policy Priorities” from 30 to 31 May 2019 in Pretoria, South Africa, in order to discuss recent advances in mental health research. The participants will explore topics ranging from neuroscience and genetics to public mental health and epidemiology as well as intervention research.

The scientific coordinators of the symposium are Professor Frank Rösler ML, University of Hamburg, on the side of Leopoldina, and Professor Crick Lund, University of Cape Town, on the side of ASSAf. The event is open for everyone interested.

A better understanding of the cognitive dimensions of human agents in their individual and collective behavior could be the key to implementing the different goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda in a coordinated manner. The symposium addresses the question of how to strengthen “brain power” for sustainable development and aims at identifying the cognitive preconditions for a successful sustainability transition.

With this symposium, Leopoldina continues the dialogue between science and politics on sustainability and builds on the symposium “The Turn to Sustainability?”, which was held in Berlin in October 2016.