News

05.06.2023

Assignments and Public Holiday

Feedback uploaded

The feedback on your last two assignments has been uploaded over the weekend. Please check it out on your personal status pages.

Revise and Resubmit

If your submission says either “fail” or “revise and resubmit”, you can still get a… Read more

Feedback uploaded

The feedback on your last two assignments has been uploaded over the weekend. Please check it out on your personal status pages.

Revise and Resubmit

If your submission says either “fail” or “revise and resubmit”, you can still get a pass by revising it and submitting it again until Monday, June 12, at 18:00.

In case you need to resubmit both Project Phase 3 and the Theories of Ethics Assignment, it will only count as one Revise and Resubmit. Please hand in both submissions in one PDF then.

Public Holiday

Next Thursday, there will not be a lecture nor a Deep Dive Session due to a public holiday (Fronleichnam). There will, however, be an online office hour in the regular slot in MS Teams for anyone with urgent questions on the current assignment. The Recap Sessions are not affected and take place as normal. This week, they are still on writing valid arguments, which is an important skill for both the assignments and the exam.

Have a nice week and enjoy the public holiday! :)

29.05.2023

Recap Sessions on Writing Valid Arguments

This week, a new topic in recap sessions will start. Leon, Ahmed and Laura will exercise writing valid arguments with you (which is an important skill for the exam). As the recap sessions never reached their full capacity, I did not open a registration this… Read more

This week, a new topic in recap sessions will start. Leon, Ahmed and Laura will exercise writing valid arguments with you (which is an important skill for the exam). As the recap sessions never reached their full capacity, I did not open a registration this time. If you want to join a session, just come to your favourite slot.

In-person recap sessions are:

  • Tue, May 30, 10:15, by Leon in SR 015, E1 3 
  • Wed, May 31, 8:30, by Ahmed in SR 106, E 1 1 
  • Tue, June 6, 10:15, by Leon in SR 015, E1 3 
  • Wed, June 7, 8:30, by Ahmed in SR 106, E 1 1 

The online recap session is:

  • Tue, June 6, 14:15, by Laura, online

Best wishes,
Sarah

15.05.2023

Recap Sessions, Change in the Schedule, Public Holiday

Recap Sessions

The recap sessions this week and next week will be about how you can detect invalidity of arguments. This is a very important topic, so we suggest you to take part in the respective recap session. There are still plenty of slots left for this… Read more

Recap Sessions

The recap sessions this week and next week will be about how you can detect invalidity of arguments. This is a very important topic, so we suggest you to take part in the respective recap session. There are still plenty of slots left for this week. So, consider registering for one of them.

Schedule Change

Due to limited demand in online recap sessions and office hours, we will changed the timetable a bit: the online office hour on Friday will be cancelled and the online recap slot on Tuesday will start alternating between an office hour and a recap session. You can see all changes in the timetable.

No lecture on Thursday

There is no lecture (and also no office hour) on Thursday, since there is a public holiday.

Have a nice week and enjoy the holiday! :)

10.05.2023

Lecture Hall Change

The lecture hall for tomorrow‘s lecture was changed due to a conference taking place at Saarland Infomatics Campus.
We will meet in HS002, E1 3. After this week, we will be in the the Günter Hotz lecture hall as usual.

See you tomorrow!

09.05.2023

Reminder: Guest Lecture (Now)

We are having a guest lecture by Ingmar Weber now (from 14:15 to 15:45) in Lecture Hall 003 (E1.3)

The title: Collected for Profit, Repurposed for Social Good: What Advertising Data Reveals About Society

The guest lecture is not mandatory, but I… Read more

We are having a guest lecture by Ingmar Weber now (from 14:15 to 15:45) in Lecture Hall 003 (E1.3)

The title: Collected for Profit, Repurposed for Social Good: What Advertising Data Reveals About Society

The guest lecture is not mandatory, but I nevertheless recommend you to come, because Ingmar Weber’s talk are usually amazing! I hope to see many of you! :)

05.05.2023

Next Deadline and Submissions

Hello everyone!

As the poll that I did during the last lecture was very inconclusive, I decided for a compromise: the next submission contains both the Theories of Ethics assignment and Project Phase 3, but the deadline is in three weeks instead of two. I… Read more

Hello everyone!

As the poll that I did during the last lecture was very inconclusive, I decided for a compromise: the next submission contains both the Theories of Ethics assignment and Project Phase 3, but the deadline is in three weeks instead of two. I hope that most of you will be happy with that solution. Future deadlines are changed accordingly (see Timetable). The benefit of this is that you now have one more week where you can concentrate on the final report.

Also, please note one important thing: for about twenty seconds, the wrong version of the file was online. Sorry for that! If you downloaded it right at 18:00, please download it again.

Best
Sarah

05.05.2023

Guest Lecture by Ingmar Weber on May 9

We will be having a guest lecture by Ingmar Weber on Tuesday, May 9, from 14:00 to 16:00 in Lecture Hall 003 (E1.3)

The title: Collected for Profit, Repurposed for Social Good: What Advertising Data Reveals About Society

The guest lecture is not mandatory,… Read more

We will be having a guest lecture by Ingmar Weber on Tuesday, May 9, from 14:00 to 16:00 in Lecture Hall 003 (E1.3)

The title: Collected for Profit, Repurposed for Social Good: What Advertising Data Reveals About Society

The guest lecture is not mandatory, but I nevertheless recommend you to come, because Ingmar Weber’s talk are usually amazing!

02.05.2023

Feedback Online for Project Phase 1

You can now see our feedback for your submissions to Project Phase 1. You will find a pdf on your personal status page where you have originally submitted your solution. Most of them will not contain a lot of feedback, since we asked for your opinion and there… Read more

You can now see our feedback for your submissions to Project Phase 1. You will find a pdf on your personal status page where you have originally submitted your solution. Most of them will not contain a lot of feedback, since we asked for your opinion and there is little to say about that.

If you failed the first assignment, you have the possibility to resubmit a revised version until Tuesday, 9 May, at 18:00 on your personal status page.

27.04.2023

Recap Sessions on Theories of Ethics

If you want to participate in an in-person recap session, you will have to register on your personal status page. This is to ensure that these session say within the capacity of the rooms they are in. The registration is first-come-first-serve. Please only… Read more

If you want to participate in an in-person recap session, you will have to register on your personal status page. This is to ensure that these session say within the capacity of the rooms they are in. The registration is first-come-first-serve. Please only register if you plan on coming, so that you do not take slots away from other students.

If you want to participate in an online recap session, you do not need to register, but you can just come to your preferred slot. Online recap sessions will take place in MS Teams.

During the recap sessions you will get to practice skills that are relevant for both your assignments and the exam. In case of the recap sessions on theories of ethics, this will be: practicing the application of consequentialism, of Kant’s moral theory, and of Scanlon’s contractualism. Attendence is completely voluntary and all materials that are used in the sessions will be posted online, too. Notice that all six recap sessions in the next two weeks will be identical. So, attending one of them will be enough.

See you around! :)

20.04.2023

How to Join Online Office Hours and Online Recap Sessions

Some of our office hours and recap sessions are online. The timetable tells you, when these are. If you want to participate, you have to join the Ethics for Nerds team in MS Teams. This is how to do it:

  1. Open MS Teams, click "Teams" in your sidebar, and use… Read more

Some of our office hours and recap sessions are online. The timetable tells you, when these are. If you want to participate, you have to join the Ethics for Nerds team in MS Teams. This is how to do it:

  1. Open MS Teams, click "Teams" in your sidebar, and use the button for joining and creating teams.
  2. Enter this team code: lbvcq96
  3. Join the respective call in the only existing channel.
  4. Ignore all the other functionalities. (They're useless for us, but Teams doesn't let me disable them.)

See you around!

Show all

Ethics for Nerds

Time: Thursday, 8:30 to 10:00 
Place: Günter-Hotz-Hörsaal (E2 2)
Recordings of each lecture will be made available to you.

Many computer scientists will be confronted with morally difficult situations at some point in their career – be it in research, in business, or in industry. Ethics for Nerds equips you with the crucial assets enabling you to recognize such situations, and to devise ways to arrive at a justified moral judgment regarding the moral problems you will encounter. For that, you will be made familiar with moral theories from philosophy, as well as different Codes of Ethics for computer scientists. Since one can quickly get lost when talking about ethics and morals, it is especially important to talk and argue clearly and precisely. In order to prepare you for that, Ethics for Nerds also covers what is usually known as "Critical Thinking". In the end, you will be able to assess a morally controversial topic from computer science on your own and give a convincing argument for your assessment.

Ethics for Nerds is intended to always be as clear, precise, and analytic as possible. What you won't find here is the meaningless bla-bla, needlessly poetic language, and vague and wordy profundity that some people tend to associate with philosophy. You will, however, get many interesting insights into philosophy, ethics, and computer science – or so we have been told.

This course is a Vertiefungsvorlesung and worth 6 ECTS-points. All bachelor and master students are welcome!

Contents

This course covers:

  • an introduction to the methods of philosophy and the basics of normative as well as applied ethics;
  • relevant moral codices issued by professional associations like the ACM, the IEEE, and more;
  • argumentation theory (also known as "Critical Thinking")
  • starting points to evaluate practices and technologies already in use or not that far away, including for instance: filter bubbles and echo chambers, ML-algorithms as predictive tools, GPS-tracking, CCTV and other tools from surveillance, fitness trackers, big data analysis, autonomous vehicles, lethal autonomous weapons systems and so on;
  • an outlook on more futuristic topics like machine ethics, roboethics, and superintelligences;
  • and more.

Presuppositions

We expect basic knowledge of propositional and first-order logic, an open mind, and interest to look at computer science in ways you probably are not used to. (If you come from a subject of study that usually does not cover logics, you can nevertheless take the course. Just get in touch with us before.)

The lecture and all its materials are in English, but if you feel more comfortable to write assignments and exams in German, you are invited to do so. For this course you should at least have a level of either German or English that is equivalent to a C1 level (see here for further details). We do not need any formal proof that you fulfil these requirements, but we recommend taking them seriously. If you are in any doubt whether this course is suitable for you, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Organization

There is a weekly in-person lecture, that is also made available as a recording so you can watch it at home, if you want to. There are also office hours and different kinds of tutorials that you can (but to not have to) attend. You will learn more on this in the first lecture.

There is a project in which you have to write an ethics report on a fictitious app. (If you have taken the lecture before: this project replaces the term paper you had to write in previous years.) The project is done in groups of four to six and is split up in bi-weekly assignments. You have to pass the project in order to get the exam admission.

Your grade is determined by the exam (or the re-exam).

Literature (not mandatory)

Upon request, we added some literature that may be interesting to read before the course. Reading this, however, is not mandatory! We will cover everything that you will need to know during the course (except for the presuppositions above). You will not have a disadvantage if you do not read any of the literature that follows:

  1. Moor, J. H. (1985). What is computer ethics?. Metaphilosophy, 16(4), 266-275.
    A rather old paper that is nevertheless still very relevant today. Available here.
  2. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    This is the wikipedia of philosophy. Many (though not all) of the articles there are high-quality. Among others, the following articles are relevant for Ethics for Nerds and are relatively easy to understand without a philosophical background:
  3. Another resource of material can be the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in particular the following articles:
  4. Rosenberg, J. F. (1984). The practice of philosophy: A handbook for beginners.
    If you are very much into philosophy, you can also dive a little deeper into the daily business of philosophers by having a look at this all-time-classic introduction to being a philosopher. Sadly, the English edition of this book is usually very expensive, but you will find the book in the SULB and in the philosophy library. The German translation is equally good as the English original.
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