Teaching

  • Project Socially Aware Computing (AI BSc2) Within this course students learn to address a societal challenge involving group dynamics by means of agent-based social simulation. They learn to identify relevant concepts and relations, formalise these in a dedicated environment (Netlogo), conduct simulations to test different hypothetical scenarios and validate their model with real world data. They do this by working on one large project in a chosen domain in groups of 2 students. They report their findings both written and verbally.
  • AI & Law (AI BSc2, Law in Society BSc2) Current advances in AI may be understood as the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. AI is everywhere and affects every sector of society, including law. Innovation in computational technologies have given rise to a whole range of new developments, such as autonomous cars and drones, predictive policing and automated warfare. Each of these developments has significant legal, ethical and policy implications. With autonomous driving, for example, this became particularly obvious after a pedestrian was killed for the first time by an autonomous vehicle on a test drive. How will autonomous vehicles affect the law, particularly once they are authorized for regular usage, and take the streets in large numbers? Can it even be considered ethical to have machines think by themselves? Another, closely related, AI application – automated weapons – raises potentially even more pressing issues. What are the legal and ethical implications of autonomous weapons that determine themselves when to fire, without a human being involved in the decision process? Examples like these show the tremendous impact that AI will have on the legal field; lawyers must be able to deal with this.