 Hello everyone. My name is Urs Gasser. I'm with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and I also have the great pleasure to be involved in the global network of Internet and Society Centers. It's a network that brings together more than 100 centers around the globe, and today it's my pleasure and honor actually to be in conversation with two colleagues from Europe, from Germany, working at the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation in short bit. That's easier. Sandra Zelmanovich is the research coordinator at the Institute. If I'm not mistaken, and Professor Alexander Breczner is the head of the board of directors of the Institute, and warm welcome. Thanks. Thanks for being in conversation today, which we could be together in person, but I guess that's what it is. Thanks for having us. So, no, it's a pleasure really. The Institute as I understand it is within the Bavarian Academy of Science and Humanities and as I was, you know, taking a closer look in preparation of this call. I'm impressed that you have managed really to build kind of a unique institute that's different from other centers in that it's truly networked in its DNA you have colleagues and faculty members from from different institutions working together so it's not only a multidisciplinary it's also multi institutional and I was wondering whether you could just share, Sandra, just a few, you know, give a high level of you how you're set up and what maybe also some of the topics are that that are, you know, some of the local areas of this network Institute. Right. So, so maybe I take that one. Since I have, I'll try to set things up or I did set things things up the way we did. So, and, as you said, the Institute is part of the Bavarian Academy of the sciences. There's two reasons for that one is it's a fantastic place the Bavarian Academy of the sciences. And the other reason is it's not one of the universities. And as we wanted from the beginning to involve different universities and different expertise within Bavaria. We may have had, or we would have had probably critical issues when we would have set that up at one specific place right and as all political landscapes. Sometimes it's, it's good, not to be at one specific place but maybe somewhere in between and I guess that was one of the drivers that that eventually led to the Bavarian Ministry of the sciences and research to fund this research Institute. Now we have an Institute that is a physical Institute we have a building and we have something like 32 people living and working in that building and we have a corona at the moment from totally different disciplines and we have a board of directors that are associated with different universities across Bavaria. And these are people from computer science like myself from information systems from philosophy from law from sociology from polytology and from other places and and I think they are the best that we could have found in in Bavaria. So this is funded by the state of Bavaria. It is a Bavarian initiative. And now that Institute is existing in itself but the main ideas in terms of where to go content wise with that Institute that is something that we discuss within the directorate within the board. And that's why we have that that institutional setup here so we have an Institute that is on its own located within the Bavarian Academy of the sciences, but the directors have main jobs in different places at different universities. And we do that as a side job, so to say, but all of us are extremely interested in setting up interdisciplinary research and that's why we do that. And it's also, I guess, born from from the insight that if you want to do interdisciplinary research within a university that usually is more complicated than if you do that across universities and I guess you have have made the same experience. So it's easier to work with a colleague, 6000 miles away, and then with a colleague that is just across the eye that is across the corridor. And there's good reasons for that that maybe we don't need to dive into but I think it's good to have something like that outside universities. I think it's also necessary to do that outside universities. And because at the moment our academic system is not really rewarding interdisciplinary research right if you want to go for an academic career. And then maybe it's not the brightest idea to do that as a junior researcher in interdisciplinary subject areas, but maybe you rather get yourself a name in one specific subject and then somewhat more senior people like you and me and Sandra can get into that world of interdisciplinary research. The reason being that the way we are measured and is usually with respect to one discipline and everybody knows that if you have interdisciplinary research, then from the mono disciplinary perspective. Sometimes the results that you are getting aren't too exciting, or they seemingly are not exciting but the value really is at the connection at the intersection of the different subject areas that we are seeing and that may be another reason why I think it's the right thing to do that, within one university but maybe as something that is sitting in between these. Good. And that really is the setup now that has of course fundamental consequences. And because if you want to do interdisciplinary research and again who am I telling that. I realize that it's difficult. I'm a computer scientist and I realize that it's already extremely difficult to talk to engineers or electrical engineers, even though from other disciplines perspective we are very close to each other. We are not in terms of language in terms of culture it's really difficult to do that. And we already call that interdisciplinary. And if you do that with social subtleties and philosophers and there's a part ocean. And then it's it's again a totally different question and the question is how do you organize that that work and this is one of the driving principles of our Institute. We tried to adopt an agile research methodology and now agile of course means that we are fast and quick and it's a buzzword of course, but there's a few things that that I think are really important and that are something that we need to take from or that come from agile development processes that as you know stem from from computer systems. And one of the basic ideas that that that people have had in the context of programming in the context of software development was that if you try to develop a system then it's usually a bad idea to have the overall system done by 10% and then by 20% and then by 30% then all parts done by 100% and then you integrate them. That doesn't work right for a variety of good reasons. So what that agile methodology is is propagating or is is is advocating is the idea that instead you have one part of a functionality one medium that is done by 100% and we call that a feature in computer systems. And then we add another feature that was done by 100% and we integrate. And then we go for another feature and how does that translate to interdisciplinary research. Well, if we think about what we can done within one month and we talk about an artifact that is done after one month. And then we can try to integrate that with the rest. So rather than having the legal person and the technical person and the, the, the philosophical person if you wish, and think about their problems, and then integrate their results in hindsight. We try to do that all the time with something that is always done by 100%. I think this is one of the crucial crucial ideas. Thank you. That's great. Here there's plenty of other things that I'm extremely as you can see excited to talk. Yeah, no, this sounds really exciting. And Sandra, this is a good moment to bring you into play. I know for personal experience that these sorts of even super agile organizations need a lot of coordination, a lot of coordination, especially institutions are involved. And so it's just wondering how do you on the ground manage and coordinate projects. I think Alexander pointed out at the faculty level at least people have more than one job. And so how do you organize that I see lots of sticky notes in your background is that part of it. Yeah, that's actually the outcome of one of the meetings we had just prior to Corona prior to the measures prior to the lockdowns in February. But in practice, how we do that how we try to adopt this agile research management approach as well is that we organize meetings with all the staff members and all the research projects that we fund and that we conduct ourselves. And we do that in six week, six weeks intervals. So every six weeks we meet with the staff members and we look at what has been done so far. Are there any problems, what are the challenges, how does the interdisciplinary collaboration work since every single project is an interdisciplinary project. We've actually been working quite nicely. I mean we've had some challenges this year obviously we had to digitalize some of those meetings on a quite short notice. We had the last one just yesterday where staff were presenting work in progress, but we are quite pleased with the progress despite the challenges we have now had 10 quite good journal publications coming out of the research projects. We had external ones we have had about six or seven from the internal projects within 2020. So I think it's been quite quite effective. And then we also really try during those gatherings every six weeks to, to create space for networking between the projects and try to see whether what kind of similarities we find between the project that could be built upon in terms of creating new research collaborations. So yeah, it's been a challenging year, but it's been nice and actually we also had a hybrid event we still managed to do a hybrid event in September where half of the participants were present in person and the other half were participating online and it worked really well participants really liked it. And I think that will be the future I think we will be seeing much more of these kind of hybrid events. Maybe I can add one one sentence here also if you permit. And that is something that that Sandra was was was alluding to and that that I didn't mention before. So we have two kinds of projects one is projects that we do within the Institute and interdisciplinary way and we have people who are employees of the Institute and proper that work on these things but at the same time. We have the role of a funding agency in a set in a sense because we give out money to be very in research institutes to have, have projects to have other interdisciplinary projects because we also realize that even though we have a fantastic board of directors, we don't know everything we don't cover cover everything. And, and I guess the the extra complexity of what Sandra is doing an excellent job at is that we have to call in a project within the Institute and that already is a beast, but there's a bigger beast, the bigger project with you with university research institutions across the valley. Yeah, I'm intrigued again, one of my personal passions is to, to figure out how academia and science and research can be reconfigured that it is more networked right and what you're describing. As I said at the beginning feels very much like an alternative model how to organize collaborations and yet still create the synergies and some sort of the visibility and impact so that's why I started with the model question and not the substantive question. But, but definitely we want to get to substance to and you mentioned some of the projects and I encourage the viewers to check out the website it's a, it's a really impressive, not only list of projects but also cutting edge topics that are that sound just really interesting. So, I was wondering, Alexander, I realized you, you have one project in particular that you were involved as a, as a principle investigator that's looking at the integration of ethics into software development and of course that's a topic that's you know, on many people's mind also within the network of centers and is some sort of almost like a symbol of what we talked about building these bridges across disciplines and I was wondering whether you would be willing to share a little bit more about what the project is about and what some of the challenges are as we are, you know, doing this work to bring philosophy into into engineering into software design. Right, so thanks thanks very much for for the question of course I'm extra excited about that that work at the moment we are really intensely working on that and I think it's extra cool. I'm not the one who should be able to judge that I guess. And so, let me maybe start with the second question, what is the challenge. And the challenge is different cultures, different mindsets different ways of thinking different templates in in in your mind. I, as a computer scientist think in a specific way, you as a legal person think in a specific way I think you and I we are too far away from each other. But if you talk to a sociologist and or politologist that they have a different way of thinking they have a different worldview. And in fact we try to set up these institutes for for a couple of years and we had some preliminary institutions. And I think it was very valuable for us to have these these preliminary institutions, because that taught us respect for for other disciplines So if I may make that point a bit more more tangible and I'm exaggerating things of course yeah so here's here's a very black and white world view right as a computer scientist. I have a problem, I have a solution I have a scientific contribution I write that down in 10 pages. Okay, that's it. If you're a sociologist or a philosopher, then it's not exactly that they always want to solve a problem but it's rather that the problems they have are so huge, and have been tackled for for for millennia. And that rather what you can do is you can add to the discourse. And that's a totally different mindset because it also means that you don't add up with 10 pages, but rather more. You really have clear problems there is all that kind of things. And it turns out that that, of course, you need to learn that respect because first time you're confronted with that kind of thinking. And it's, it's, it's baffling because you think, hell, why can't that person be a bit quicker, right and the other person because things are come on that computer scientists. Why can they be or why must they be so reductionist, what the hell is going on here. And you need to get to know each other and you need to learn to like each other and you need to be respectful with each other And I think this is still the, the, the main challenge that we have, we're just currently writing and I'm getting to the ethical project in in one second. We're just just writing a paper on some things and I realized that a philosopher colleague who was was working with us on the paper, sometimes just jotted down statements of a specific kind and he said X in an indicative way as a statement. And then he was developing arguments around that and I said, come on, wait a minute, you need to substantiate that you need to have references empiricist studies that substantiate the claim and it turned out that this is something that is not that relevant or that often the case in philosophy totally different kind of thinking is very important to understand that my way of thinking is not better than their way of thinking and vice versa it's just different and we need to understand to do that and I think again, the keyword here is respect. In terms of integrating ethical deliberations into software engineering, which is exactly what we are trying to do and which is a bit more more fine grant and then what you've asked about. And the question is the following. Essentially it's a question about responsibility. If we build modern technology, and that technology can be a weapon and everybody knows that this technology can be a weapon if it is abused, or if it is used in a certain way. The question is, and what is the responsibility of the different involved stakeholders. And what we are particularly interested in is what is the responsibility of a specific engineer. And that of course means already that there's a few decisions that have been taken before society has taken a few decisions before. And the company or an organization has taken several decisions before people are taught to implement a specific system. Okay, and I'm perfectly aware that if a company has decided to build weapons then you as an engineer. You may not like that but if you don't like that very effect then this is maybe not the right company for you. So there's a few things that you cannot discuss about as being a software engineer. And then there's plenty of things that you can influence as an engineer. You can think about the way that data is used you can think about logging mechanisms you can think about transparency you can think about accountability and that kind of things. So what we thought or what we observed was particularly interesting is that again an agile development that we were talking about before. And what you have is empowerment of members on the team. Right, the traditional way of software engineering was hey, he is a design of a system and you called monkey go ahead implemented. And this has totally changed. Now what we have is we have a problem we have a requirement, a vague requirement, and the development team is about to solve or is meant to solve that problem and they have a lot of freedom in how to do that. So in the sense that they are empowered by agile development methodologies, we think they should also consider ethical concerns. And what we have done is deliberation schema that can be used throughout the development, where essentially we try to interweave the process of deliberation with the development process. And one one one final note here is what we often see is is that ethicists accused of being useless, right, because people say no you come up with with this and that they are sure, but how can you actually tell us what to do. And that is demanded too much you cannot ask them what ethicists can do is this is they can sense civilize you for different topics and they can make you think. This is precisely what you have done you but you cannot expect them to give the answers. And why is that because software is so diverse that you cannot expect the specifics. And what we have very recently done is is and we have just submitted the paper is is study of codes of ethics for software engineering or for engineering. And there's about 130 of them and our understanding is they are essentially useless because they give you advice of the kind and don't do evil. Be good respect human nature and I mean that is of course true and that's certainly not wrong, but does that help shape decisions within development processes, certainly not. So I think it's relevant not to have these codes of conduct or codes of ethics, but rather have a deliberation schema that we interweave with the development process. That's exciting and this also topic that I'm very interested in we just recently wrote the chapter on professional norms as a source of governance when it comes to AI and, and one of the many interesting points you made echoes very much with me and that that we have a problem with contextuality right that's many of the applications and technologies we are talking about are highly contextual and, and it's very hard to make generalized value statements about them. At the level of a law or a policy statement or even a code of conduct and so the question then becomes, and I think you, you provided the possible answer to it. Well, how can you do justice to these contextual differences and nuances and the idea is well by, you know, putting the decision making to put decision making and deliberation at the level of where context is shaped and where context is emerging is extremely powerful as opposed to, you know, having some sort of lofty or the impossible to translate principles. Absolutely. Absolutely agree with with with with that statement. And the question of course is who is the right person to acknowledge what the context is right. And here's one example and we are currently working on on the study on that take facial recognition face recognition technology, right. Most people would not say, oh, this is evil but if you look at facial recognition technology in context, it's a totally different matter right you can use that in hospitals you can use that in public spaces you can use that in a car where the car is meant to recognize who you are, and you get totally different requirements and totally different ethical deliberations and resides right so I perfectly agree with what you said that. Sandra, we've been talking about so far about the knowledge creation process and building, you know, these bridges across institution and disciplines and that's hard enough and already a big deal and you're doing a wonderful job facilitating that. And yet you're doing more than that you're also building interfaces that these insights that the knowledge that is created is surfing the public is serving the world in one way or another. And I noticed also from from your own CV that you are very much focused at the interface also of research and academia and policy making. And so I was wondering how your institute is approaching this question of, well, not only produce world class papers and prototypes and things like that but but make sure that some sort of decision makers be it in the private or public sector. They learn about it and so I was wondering this translation across spheres how that plays out at the center and what programs when a center I mean Institute in your case. What are some of the programs you have to enable this transfer or this kind of translation process if you want to share a few ideas before we then have to wrap up unfortunately. Yeah, well, basically the Institute is structured in three main parts we have the research area we have a think tank and we have a dialogue department if you want. And what we do is we organize regular events and meetings with the public and with policymakers where we report on our results. We had some events where we've had panel discussions with our researchers with policymakers who have attended them. So I think these have been this year the main vehicles. Well, at the end of last year and early this year we did quite a few in person events with the general public so events of around 300 with 300 visitors. So that's how we are trying to kind of that's really central for us that we communicate all our work to the general public and to policymakers so far that has mainly concentrated on the area in Germany. But now what we are trying to do and we have done quite a few things as to increase our international outreach activities as well and influence or contribute to internationally relevant research which we are already doing but also build partnerships to build on what we've already done and and be more visible internationally and I guess that's also this meeting here and our membership in the network of centers is is one of these is one of the reasons is our international ambitions to really get a bit more known internationally and and disseminate our our work and we've already started to, we've been, we've had some formal meetings with Oxford Internet Institute, Professor Alfreda visited us and contributed to a panel discussion of a public event with various networking discussions with us recently at our hybrid event Professor Marina Jirotka from Oxford University as well gave a keynote speech on responsible robotics and Professor Alexander Prechner will be giving a seminar in Oxford as well so Next we do have really excellent networks from the side of our board of directors who are renowned academics, we need to really build up more these international activities as an institute with some formal collaborations and, and just very briefly to to our very recently launched international research fellowship, which we've also circulated actually only a few days ago to all the members of the network of centers and already a day after we received the first application of a staff member from one of these centers in the network so so that's been great. We've uploaded that also in the individual village booth of the NOC now so we'll be looking forward to tomorrow applications there. But yeah so these are the kind of activities we are trying to and we are very young I mean we started last year I myself joined the Institute in November 2020. We have also been in the process in the first four months of defining the kind of challenges and main areas of focus for our research. And then the, what you see behind me those post it that was actually when all our projects came together in in February this year we asked them to tell us what kind of contributions they will be making to our challenges that that we have defined. And that's what came out of it so the idea also next year in addition to the international fellowship is also to start now creating, since we have some first results from the project is to start creating some kind of a knowledge map and bringing together the outputs and the knowledge created in those projects, and continuing to disseminate it amongst policymakers and the general public. That sounds fantastic and hopefully we have a chance to follow up also bilaterally. This is something we aspire to do also at the level of networked organizations like the global network to create such a knowledge map. It's extremely difficult to do because everyone is so busy and naturally, but I think it will be an incredibly powerful tool to understand who's working and what and visualize the intersections and have easier pathways also for policymakers to find the resources that are already there and for us from the research side also to identify synergies going forward. So very eager to learn from your experience as as you are to go such a mapping. And what wanted just to end one by congratulating you it's amazing what you've already achieved and built in such a short time. It's truly impressive and also inspiring. And second of course to thank you so much for taking the time to be on this call today. And we're really looking forward I'm looking forward to collaborating much more over the months and years to come and this was just a wonderful start to maybe share a few of the topics and also learn from the model that you pioneered with your institute so thank you so much and have a great weekend and thanks again. And thank you also for organizing all this by the way this is also a lot of work with that network and we very much appreciate your effort there so thank you very much. You're very kind. Thank you. Bye.