M. Bailey

Engineering ethics education often emphasizes teaching reasoning skills while overlooking other influential dimensions on one’s ethical behavior – e.g., whether students see ethical responsibility as part of who they are as professionals. One of the challenges in integrating such overlooked dimensions in engineering ethics education is the limited resources in assessing student outcomes. To address this challenge, adapting a widely used moral identity scale to the engineering context, this paper introduces an initial development and validation effort of the Engineering Professional Moral Identity (EPMI) instrument, designed to assess the extent to which ethical responsibility is integrated into one’s identity as an engineer. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were performed with survey data from 515 practicing engineers. Results supported a two-factor structure, internalization and symbolization, with an eight-item model. We argue that EPMI complements reasoning-focused measures by capturing the identity dimension of ethical development, which enables longitudinal tracking of students’ identity development and targeted instruction. Findings from this study provide initial validity evidence for EPMI and position the tool as a practical tool for assessing and cultivating identity-centered ethics education in engineering education.

The increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into human teams necessitates a deeper understanding of how to foster effective collaboration. This study investigates how incorporating emojis, as a representation of emotional intelligence, into AI communication influences human-AI team dynamics. Specifically, the study examined how emojis impact human trust in AI teammates, whether different types of emojis yield varied outcomes, and how emoji use affects the perceived performance of both AI and human teammates. A controlled experiment was conducted with participants who collaborated with a simulated AI teammate on a geographic location identification task. The AI teammate’s reliability and the use of emojis were manipulated across different experimental conditions. Results showed that neither the AI teammate’s reliability nor the use of emojis significantly influenced participants’ explicit trust ratings in the AI teammate. These findings highlight the complex interplay of trust, perception, and emotional cues in HAT collaboration.

Human-AI teamwork is no longer a topic of the future. Given the importance of trust in human teams, the question arises how trust functions in human-AI teams. Although trust has long been studied from a human-centred perspective (e.g. in psychology and philosophy), a computational perspective and from the perspective of human trust in AI (e.g. in human-computer interaction), the study of trust in human-AI interaction in a team setting is still a novel field. For this reason, the MULTITTRUST (Multidisciplinary perspectives on Human-AI Team Trust) workshop series was founded. In this paper, we present the main outcomes after three editions. Our contributions are: an overview of the shared language of concepts and definitions; an outline of the main open research challenges; and methodological guidelines for further studies in meaningful human-AI team trust. These three contributions form a foundational roadmap towards a better understanding of trust in human-AI team interactions.

This paper explores the roles of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals in AI policymaking, addressing the urgent need for informed governance in emerging technologies. With AI's complex sociotechnical impacts, STEM expertise is crucial for balancing benefits and mitigating risks like bias and privacy concerns. Despite their potential influence, the specific contributions of STEM professionals in AI policy remain underexplored. To address this gap, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 STEM professionals who have both educational and professional experience in STEM and policy, and have actively participated in AI policymaking. The data revealed two primary role groups: (1) advisors, gatekeepers, and influencers, who leverage their expertise in STEM and policy to guide stakeholders and actively influence policy decisions, and (2) facilitators and brokers, who facilitate connections and manage the flow of information between stakeholders. This typology highlights the varied contributions of STEM professionals to AI governance and policy development.

This dissertation is an examination of things in themselves as they are presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. Chapter 1 deals with Kant’s notion of a thing in itself generally. I argue that Kant uses ‘things in themselves’ in two ways: to refer to logically possible entities that, if they exist, are ontologically distinct from appearances; to signify the thought of empirical objects apart from sensibility. This follows from the fact that the notion of a thing in itself is a function of the understanding, but that our intellectual representations cannot relate to things in themselves. Chapters 2 and 3 attend to two theses of things in themselves: they are unknowable; they are non-spatiotemporal. Thesis seems to render any judgment of things in themselves epistemically unjustifiable, thereby undermining Kant’s right to maintain either thesis or. Thesis seems to rest on an invalid argument and, consequently, fails to rule out the possibility that things in themselves are spatiotemporal. Chapter 2 focuses on establishing that Kant is entitled to the Identity Thesis. I argue that the Identity Thesis secures a valid argument for thesis. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Kant’s argument for the transcendental ideality of space entails that our sensible representations cannot relate to things in themselves. Since neither our sensible, nor our intellectual, representations can relate to things in themselves, thesis actually expresses a subtler claim: we cannot cognize things in themselves through our representations. I argue that this is neither self-undermining, nor does it undermine thesis ; however, it does restrict us to a weak reading of thesis, such that it cannot rule out the possibility of a strong structural isomorphism obtaining between things in themselves and space and time. I conclude by arguing that this new neglected alternative does not present Kant’s cognitive theory with any serious difficulties.

A Black feminist disability framework allows for methodological considerations of the intersectional nature of oppression. Our work in this article is twofold: to acknowledge the need to consider disability in Black Studies and race in Disability Studies, and to forward an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, and disability to address the gaps in both Black Studies and Disability Studies. By employing a Black feminist disability framework, scholars of African American and Black Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Disability Studies have a flexible and useful methodology through which to consider the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of disability.

Pandemic plans recommend phases of response to an emergent infectious disease outbreak, and are primarily aimed at preventing and mitigating human-to-human transmission. These plans carry presumptive weight and are increasingly being operationalized at the national, regional and international level with the support of the World Health Organization. The conventional focus of pandemic preparedness for EIDs of zoonotic origin has been on public health and human welfare. However, this focus on human populations has resulted in strategically important disciplinary silos. As the risks of zoonotic diseases have implications that reach across many domains outside traditional public health, including anthropological, environmental, and veterinary fora, a more inclusive ecological perspective is paramount for an effective response to future outbreaks.