Pedro Guedes

The European Project Semester (EPS), offered by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), is a capstone programme designed for undergraduate students in engineering, product design, and business. EPS@ISEP fosters project-based learning, promotes multicultural and interdisciplinary teamwork, and ethics- and sustainability-driven design. This study applies Natural Language Processing techniques, specifically text mining, to analyse project papers produced by EPS@ISEP teams. The proposed method aims to identify evidence of ethical concerns within EPS@ISEP projects. An innovative keyword mapping approach is introduced that first defines and refines a list of ethics-related keywords through prompt engineering. This enriched list of keywords is then used to systematically map the content of project papers. The findings indicate that the EPS@ISEP robotics project papers analysed demonstrate awareness of ethical considerations and actively incorporate them into design processes. The method presented is adaptable to various application areas, such as monitoring compliance with responsible innovation or sustainability policies.

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence hold the potential of significantly augmenting human cognitive and physical performance, giving light-speed and extreme accuracy to human systems and processes, contributing to overcome some of the most complex challenges that humankind faces nowadays. But intelligent technologies also pose high risks to human safety, autonomy and dignity and they can also negatively impact the environment affecting and even threatening the planet’s sustainability and the life of other species. By questioning the ontological status of intelligent tools, this book analyzes their level of efficiency and ethical performance, across distinct domains and settings, highlighting the role of standardisation, certification and governance in the production and deployment of beneficial intelligent systems. The present book is a fundamental reading both to academia and industry, i.e. to all those involved in the design, production and safe and ethical deployment of intelligent technologies.