Objective
EGAIS will investigate the ethical governance in EU research projects with the goal of providing a framework for improved governance mechanisms that will address potential ethical issues arising from new and emerging technologies.
The Ambient Intelligence projects will be used as a starting point of analysis, but the results will be tested to other emerging fields such as nanotechnologies, biodiversity and converging technologies.
Usually projects with technical development do not sufficiently integrate the ethical issues that arise: the governance of ethics is missing and no guidelines have been provided at the EU and international level. These difficulties have been recognised at EU level, resulting in the attention paid to ethics and ICT in FP7 and partially in FP6.
Adopting a bottom-up approach, EGAIS will investigate how ethical governance considerations could be embedded into the research and technology development culture of EU research so that they become a natural part of the evaluation and technical development process.
The interdisciplinary project team will provide new governance guidelines addressing the integration of ethics into technical development projects that could be used in any field of technology development. Guidelines will emerge from the following steps: empirical analysis (of ethical governance measures within EU funded projects), classification of existing projects based on their ethical governance models and interpretation, application of theoretical outcomes to different technological domains to catalogue deficiencies in ethical governance mechanisms (portability of the problem), production of guidelines for concretely embedding ethics into projects in any EU technological development practices (portability of the solution).
EGAIS will collect feedback from key stakeholders (EU policy makers, project leaders, academia, etc.) through a series of workshops. Dissemination activities will include the industry and civil society.
Fields of science
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP7-SCIENCE-IN-SOCIETY-2008-1
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator
20123 Milano
Italy