Seminars and Events

Spring 2008 Program

Thursday, January 31, 2008; 4:30 pm. Professor M.L. (Missy) Cummings, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The Social and Ethical Impact of Automated Decision Support Designs."
Baker Hall 136A (Adamson Wing), Carnegie Mellon main Oakland campus

Because of the inherent complexity of socio-technical systems, automated decision support systems, often seen as legitimate authorities, are particularly vulnerable to potential ethical pitfalls that include diminishing moral agency and responsibility, as well as an erosion of accountability. This talk will focus on the development of human computer interfaces for decision support systems, which can introduce a moral buffer, a form of psychological distancing, that allows people to ethically distance themselves from their actions.

A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, Cummings was one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This talk is sponsored by the Humanities Scholars Program and the International Relations Program.

Download a PDF of this event poster (~12Mb)
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Thursday, September 11; 4:30 p.m. The Giler Humanities Lecture:
Sarah Igo, Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. "The Averaged American: Citizens and Statistics in the 20th Century."
Baker Hall 136A (Adamson Wing), Carnegie Mellon main Oakland campus

Igo is the author of The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2006), which explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation.

Her research interests are in modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere. She is currently at work on a cultural history of privacy, examined through legal statutes, technological innovations, professional codes, and re-imaginings of domestic life.

This talk is sponsored by the Humanities Scholars Program, the Science and Humanities Scholars program, the International Relations Program and the Department of Statistics.

Download a PDF of this event poster (~1Mb)