Principal Investigator
Prof. Dr. Ibo van de Poel
Project leader
Ibo van de Poel is Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor in Ethics and Technology and head of the Department of Values, Technology & Innovation (VTI). He has a background in philosophy, engineering, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). His work combines philosophical rigor and conceptual clarification with empirical investigations, which are always aimed at understanding and improving technology and engineering practice.
Van de Poel is fascinated by such questions as how to deal with values, responsibility and uncertainty in the design, development and operation of new technology. His work focuses on three interrelated areas in the ethics of technology, i.e. design for values, responsibility in technology, and dealing with uncertain risks of (new) technologies.
He has developed an approach that helps to translate values into design requirements and he has written publications on how to deal with conflicting values in engineering design, especially in the light of value incommensurability. In his current ERC Advanced Grant project, he is investigating how (moral) values may change due to new technological developments, and how to account for that in design for values.
In his previous NWO VICI project on New Technologies as Social experiments, he contributed to a new approach to the risk governance of newly emerging technologies. Current approaches no longer suffice due to high levels of uncertainty. Recently, he has begun to investigate how the introduction of a new technology is also a kind of moral experiment, in which new moral issues may arise that are hard to anticipate beforehand.
Senior Researchers
Amineh Ghorbani is an assistant professor in computational sociology. She received her PhD in 2013 on modelling socio-technical system. She has greatly been inspired with the work of Elinor Ostrom.
Her research mainly focuses on studying how institutions (rules, norms, strategies) emerge in socio-technical system and how they change over time.
She uses computational modelling, mainly agent-based as her research tool. Her current research focus is “collective action” with application to community energy systems.
Dr. Amineh Ghorbani
Assistant Professor
Dr. Behnam Taebi
Associate Professor
Behnam Taebi is Associate Professor in ethics of technology at Delft University of Technology, and Associate with the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He studied Material Science and Engineering (2006) and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Technology (2010).
His research interests are in energy ethics, nuclear ethics, responsible research and innovation (RRI) and engineering ethics. Taebi has finished a Veni project (2014-2018) and he is currently working on a joint RRI project on understanding controversies in energy technologies (both projects awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).
Taebi is the coordinating editor of a volume on The Ethics of Nuclear Energy (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of six special issues with Journal of Risk Research (2015 and 2019), Sustainability (2019), Science and Engineering Ethics (2019), International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2019) and Risk, Hazard, Crisis and Public Policy(2019). Taebi is currently writing a monograph on Ethics and Engineering (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
He is a member of The Dutch Royal Young Academy of Arts and Sciences (in Dutch: KNAW/DJA) and a member of the OECD Expert Group on ‘Transdisciplinary Research’.
Aimee van Wynsberghe has been working in ICT and robotics since 2004. She began her career as part of a research team working with surgical robots in Canada at CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advance Robotics). She is Assistant Professor in Ethics and Technology at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
She is co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and on the board of the Institute for Accountability in a Digital Age. She is a 2018 L’Oreal Unesco ‘For Women in Science‘ laureate. Aimee also serves as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI and is a founding board member of the Netherlands AI Alliance.
Aimee has been named one of the Netherlands top 400 influential women under 38 by VIVA and was named one of the 25 ‘women in robotics you need to know about’.
She is author of the book Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design, and Implementation and has been awarded an NWO personal research grant to study how we can responsibly design service robots.
She has been interviewed by BBC, Quartz, Financial Times, and other International news media on the topic of ethics and robots, and is often invited to speak at International conferences and summits.
Dr. Aimee Robbins-van Wynsberghe
Assistant Professor
Postdocs
Dr. Michael Klenk
Postdoctoral researcher
The research of Michael Klenk covers foundational topics about the nature of morality, moral progress, and moral knowledge. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions and use resources from metaethics, epistemology, anthropology, and moral psychology in pursuit of answers.
Before coming to Delft, he completed my PhD with the distinction ‘cum laude’ at Utrecht University. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University, Harvard University, and Oxford University during his PhD.
From September 2019 until September 2020, he will be working at the University of St Gallen and at Stanford University with the support of a Niels Stensen Fellowship, while maintaining the connection to the Value Change Project.
Olya Kudina (Ukraine) is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy of technology, exploring the relation between technologies and value dynamism. She is particularly interested in the way AI-powered technologies, such as Digital Voice Assistants, change the norms and values of people at present.
Olya’s PhD dissertation at the University of Twente looked into the way technologies co-shape human values, highlighting the technologically mediated formation of meaning in this regard.
In her research, Olya combines empirical explorations and philosophical analysis, which prompts her interest in digital ethnography. In general, Olya’s research interests span across the fields of ethics of emerging technologies, (post)phenomenology, hermeneutics, bioethics, and design.
Dr. Olya Kudina
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Steffen Steinert
Postdoctoral researcher
Steffen Steinert studied Philosophy, History and Sociology at the Technical University of Dresden (Germany), and the New School for Social Research, New York (USA). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Munich.
Steffen’s main research interest is philosophy of technology and he as also focused on ethics of robotics and ethical implications of brain-computer interfaces. He is particularly interested in ontology of technology, the relation between values and technology, and the connection between technology and emotions.
Steffen has published papers on, amongst others, roboethics, agency and brain-computer interfaces, affective brain-computer-interfaces, art creation and technology, the role of art and emotions in technology development, as well as philosophy of science. He also taught courses on philosophy and ethics of technology at various universities (e.g., TU Delft, University of Technology Hamburg).
When he is not doing research, Steffen enjoys reading novels, going to the movies and museums, and travelling.
Tristan de Wildt’s work concentrates on the social acceptance of energy systems. While a large share of this literature originates from behavioural sciences and social psychology, Tristan uses ethics of technology as a starting point. Combined with methods from complexity and data sciences, the usage of this literature results in the specification of design requirements and policy guidelines that are more robust towards present and future uncertainties.
Dr.ir. Tristan de Wildt
Postdoctoral researcher
PhD Candidates
Joost Alleblas, M.Sc.
PhD Candidate
Joost Alleblas studied at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Amsterdam and ESSEC-Paris. He obtained a master in both Philosophy and Economics. He has taught design ethics in Dessau (Hochschule Anhalt) and at the Design Akademie Berlin, as well as at the Saxion University of Applied Sciences (Deventer & Enschede).
His focus is on ethics in design and the effects of emerging technologies on society and individuals. He is interested in discovering how philosophy can help designers and engineers to be reflective on the side-effects of their innovations and improve on their analyses of the future and their place in it.
Reflection in action, and the development of (moral) tools to envision the future are two of his interests in design, next to understanding how designers and engineers see themselves as moral actors.
He has published on Virtual Reality and the Experience of Nature (2016), Surveillance and Singapore (2019) and is currently writing on Anonymity in Design.
Tom Coggins is a PhD candidate working on the research line ‘Design for value change in robot systems and artificial intelligence’ within the project ‘Designing for Value Change’. For his PhD research, Tom is investigating the impact self-driving cars and socially adaptive electronic partners have on normative value systems.
Before joining TU Delft in 2019, he completed a research masters in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and a bachelors degree in philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. Throughout his studies, he focused on ethics and the philosophy of technology. His master’s thesis examined the ontological role technology plays within the work of Gilbert Simondon and Karl Marx.
Tom Coggins, M.Sc.
PhD Candidate
Anna Melnyk, M.Sc.
PhD Candidate
Anna Melnyk studied Philosophy of Technology at the University of Twente, where she specialized in technologies and values. In her thesis Anna explored the role of technomoral virtues in cyberwarfare to reveal the relevance of human-centered values in the development of regulations for cyber domain.
Previously, Anna received MA and BA in philosophy from Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine) where she explored the teleology of pragmatism and the philosophical implications of pragmatically oriented education.
Her academic interests are in the domain of philosophy and ethics of technology, ethics of risks, bioethics and military ethics, moral philosophy, but also diverge to history and science and technology studies.