news & events

Around 150 international researchers will be discussing the interplay between technology and transformation at the 11th “Tensions of Europe” conference at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) from September 19 to 21, 2024. The aim of the conference is to shed light on the technological, but also the political, social and ecological aspects of comprehensive change in Europe and other regions.

The conference will open on Thursday, September 19, 5 p.m., in the Great Hall of the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice with welcoming remarks by Viadrina President Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle, and an English-language panel discussion on “Co-Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe in Past and Present”. Participants:

• Miglė Bareikytė, Professor of Digital Studies at ENS
• Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Professor of Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, European University Viadrina
• Dr. Valeria Korablyova, sociologist at the Charles University in Prague
• Dr. Susann Worschech, political sociologist, European University Viadrina

The discussion will be moderated by ENS Director and Professor for Sociology of Technology, Jan-Hendrik Passoth.

The “Tensions of Europe” conference is organized every two years by the international research network of the same name. The network focuses on international research, teaching and transfer activities on technology and European history. In the run-up to the conference, around 20 young researchers from many European countries come together for a three-day summer school.
The summer school and conference are being held at the Viadrina for the first time this year. The organizers are the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies (VCPU) and the ENS.

ENS Professor for Digital Studies Migle Bareikye is one of the organizers of the Summer School "Platformization,
Digital Disinformation & Non-Democratic Politics - Belarus in Comparative Perspective" to take place from 16-27 July 2024 at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Summer School will explore both the consequences of digital platforms’ omnipresence in non-democracies, with a special focus on Belarus, as well as the anti-democratic aspects of digital developments in democracies, such as digital disinformation. It  emphasises the critical entanglement of both the emancipatory politicisation and deliberative democratic practices, and the unprecedented repressions in Belarus today with the reality of digital platforms. It also exploits the tension between the logics of infrastructures as stable and usually state owned and those of digital platforms as constantly re-programmable and privately owned and the ways this opposition develops and stands out in post-Soviet authoritarianism and in comparable cases. 

The program features multiple contributions by Professor Migle Bareikyte as well as ENS PhD Researcher Johanna Hiebl. The full program is available online or for download below.

On 25 June 2024, 4:15 PM, we are happy to host ENS Research Fellow Jean-Christophe Boucher (University of Calgary, Canada) as a guest speaker in our Research Seminar. Everyone is welcome to join either on-site in the ENS Coworking Space or online via Zoom (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

Abstract:

The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Referred to as transnational populism, authors suggest that emphasis on the ‘people’ as a ‘horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations allows populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6,7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada's January- February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis (Fine-tuned BERT-base-Uncased) to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.

On 4 June 2024, we were happy to host the first ever ENS Fellows and Friends Paper Workshop at the ENS Coworking Space. It featured an interdisciplinary lineup of top international scholars presenting their latest research on AI and data processing. Each 60-minute paper session included a 5-10 minutes input by the author, followed by a 10-minute commentary, and concluded with a discussion and Q&A session. We were very happy to welcome notable speakers from Georgetown, LSE, and Oxford, such as danah boyd, Orla Lynskey, Jeremias Adams-Prassl, Nora Ni Loideain, Philipp Hacker, and Joanna Bryson.

The morning sessions featured danah boyd, followed by Orla Lynskey discussing "The Regulation of Inferences." The afternoon included presentations by Jeremias Adams-Prassl on his latest Book Proposal on “Technology Law," Philipp Hacker on "Generative Discrimination," and Nora Ni Loideain on "AI and Facial Recognition Regulation – Divergences in EU and UK Law." The workshop concluded with Joanna Bryson's presentation on “An AI Cold War” and a networking session with drinks on the CP rooftop terrace.

Thank you all for coming and being our guests - your feedback was very encouraging to establish this format and we can't wait to see you again!

Join us on Monday, 27 May, 5:00 - 6:30 PM at the ENS Coworking Space for a guest talk by Tom Børsen, Associate Professor at the Aalborg University Department of Sustainability and Planning. Børsens presentation of "The Routledge International Handbook on Engineering Ethics Education" is organized in the context of the Board of Directors meeting of the European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology (ESST) hosted at ENS on 27-28 May 2024.

Professor Børsen is part of the Technical Faculty of IT and Design, Techno-Anthropology and Participation and the Center for Applied Ethics at Aalborg University. His research mainly focuses on four aspects of responsible innovation:

• Ethical Technology Assessment
• Robust Technologies through Action Research
• Teaching Responsibility in STEM
• Interdisciplinary Policy Advice on Technological Risks

Everyone is welcome to join his talk at the ENS Coworking Space at Collegium Polonicum, Słubice.

For those who cannot join on-site: Feel free to join us online using the link below.

We are happy to welcome Siarhei Liubimau as the latest guest researcher in our ENS fellowship program "Datafication in European Societies". During his stay from 8-27 April 2024, he will be hosted by ENS Professor Migle Bareikyte with whom he co-organizes the DAAD Summer School “Platformization, Digital Disinformation and Non-Democratic Politics: Belarus in Comparative Perspective” in July 2024 at the EHU in Vilnius.

Siarhei Liubimau is Associate Professor and Lead of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. He explores through the infrastructure lens the relations between digital platforms (both big commercial and bottom-up civic tech), everyday, and non-democratic politics. His project at ENS looks at the quantitative and qualitative aspects of Instagram usage in Belarus and Venezuela from the perspective of repressive measures taken by both states in the digital sphere.

Siarhei Liubimau will be the first speaker in the open ENS Research Seminar this summer semester. On 23 April at 4:15 PM, he will give a talk on "Platformization of Politics in Non-Democracies: Comparative Perspective on Claim-Making, Repressions, and Social Media Public in Belarus''.

The seminar will take place in a hybrid format both in the ENS Coworking Space at Collegium Polonicum and on Zoom. Everyone interested is welcome to join the open format.

Siarhei Liubimau's project studies the relations between repressions in authoritarian states and the usage of digital platforms, with the focus on the case of the Instagram usage in Belarus and in Venezuela. During the seminar, he will talk about the role of digital platforms in Belarus' unfinished revolution of 2020 and the digitalization of state repressions. He will further discuss how analysis of ‘big data’ helps us to understand the resulting social media public in Belarus in comparative perspective (with emphasis on Venezuela among other comparable cases).

Welcome at ENS - looking forward to working with you!

The recently launched expert network RECSAI (International Expert Consortium on the Regulation, Economics, and Computer Science of AI) kicks off its conference series with a first workshop in the frame of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Swizterland. Organized by ENS Professor Philipp Hacker and Professor Sarah Hammer (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA), the workshop consists of two expert panels:

Panel 1: Towards International AI Regulation, 10 - 11 am CET (Chair: Philipp Hacker)
Panelists:

• Ramayya Krishnan, Professor and Dean, CMU; Member, National AI Advisory Committee to the US President
• Miriam Vogel, Chair of the National AI Advisory Committee to the US President; President and CEO, EqualAI
  Kai Zenner, European Parliament
  Rasmus Rothe, Co-Founder and CTO, Merantix

Panel 2: Roundtable: US and EU AI Regulation: Next Steps for Businesses and Society, 11:15 am - 12:30 pm CET (Chair: Sarah Hammer)
Panelists:

• Brent Mittelstadt, Professor, Oxford
• Fred Oswald, Professor, Rice; Member, National AI Advisory Committee to the US President
• Christoph Winterhalter, ISO Board Member & VP Strategy and Policy, and CEO of DIN
• Kai Zenner, European Parliament
• Philipp Hacker, Professor, ENS/ European University Viadrina
• Ramayya Krishnan, Professor and Dean, CMU; Member, National AI Advisory Committee to the US President
• Dietrich Chen, EY-Parthenon Managing Director and Member of the Task Force on Generative AI, Commercial Strategy, Ernst & Young LLP
• Jessica Renier, Institute of International Finance, Managing Director of Digital Finance
  

Welchen Einfluss hat Technologie auf unsere Demokratie? Welche Gefahren und Chancen birgt Künstliche Intelligenz (KI)? Diesen Fragen widmet das Berliner Ensemble am 21. Januar 2024 gleich einen ganzen Thementag unter dem Motto "KI, Demokratie und Nerds". Veranstaltungsort ist das Neue Haus (Bertolt-Brecht-Platz 1; 10117 Berlin).

Den Auftakt macht von 13:00-14:30 Uhr die Podiumsdiskussion "Der Geist in der Maschine - Über das Verschwimmen von Realität und Simulation" mit Jürgen Geuter (aka. tante), Merzmensch (aka. Vladimir Alexeev) und ENS-Professorin für Digitale Demokratie, Ulrike Klinger. Es geht um die Auswirkungen von Algorithmen, Deepfakes und Bots auf unsere Gesellschaft und die daraus resulltierenden ethischen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Schlussfolgerungen.

Unter dem Titel "Schöne Neue Arbeitswelt - Zwischen Clickwork und dem Versprechen von Freiheit" diskutieren von 15:00-16:30 Uhr Robert Dorschel, Kathrin Ganz und ENS-Professor für Recht und Ethik der Digitalen Gesellschaft, Philipp Hacker über die Auswirkungen von KI auf die weltweiten Arbeitsmärkte.

Weitere Programmpunkte des Thementags:

• 17:00-18:00 Uhr, Neues Haus: Podiumsdiskussion "Demokratische Intelligenz - Hacks für demokrat:innen im KI-Zeitalter" - mit Sebastian Hotz (aka. El Hotzo) und Theresa Züger
• 19:30 Uhr, Großes Haus: "Friedman im Gespräch" - mit Michael Friedman, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger und Armin Nassehi
• 20:00-21:15 Uhr, Neues Haus: "Es kann doch nur noch besser werden - Ein Stück mit Musik für Diverse Leute" - von Sibylle Berg

Der Eintritt zu allen Veranstaltungen ist frei. Kostenlose Tickets sind über die Theaterkasse oder den Webshop des Berliner Ensembles erhältlich.

ENS Professor Philipp Hacker is one of the founding members of the "International Expert Consortium on the Regulation, Economics, and Computer Science of AI (RECSAI)". The network brings together international experts from Europe, the USA, South Africa, Brazil and Australia, among others, with the aim of examining and evaluating the technical and legal implications of AI from an interdisciplinary perspective. Philipp Hacker is leading the project together with former ENS research fellow Professor Sarah Hammer from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. RECSAI receives funding from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.

The core objective of RECSAI is to strengthen the international AI research network, particularly with regard to the legal and economic implications. The committee will also provide science-based recommendations for policymakers and international organizations. An international conference series is also planned, including events during the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2024, the United Nations AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva in May 2024 and at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. in September 2024.

Philipp Hacker says: “I am very happy that the Dieter Schwarz Foundation enables us to discuss and research the most pressing social issues in the field of AI with a top-class group of experts from all continents in the coming years. Topics such as non-discrimination, sustainability and national security, but also the effective application of AI and compensating for the shortage of skilled workers are at the heart of our efforts. I look forward to the collaboration and the insights we will develop together."

The network will be officially presented as part of Philipp Hacker's inaugural lecture on Tuesday, 5 December 2023, at 6 PM in the Logensaal of the Viadrina, Logenstraße 11, in Frankfurt (Oder). The event is open to the public. Please make sure to register online to join on-site and click here for the live stream.

Künstliche Intelligenz erschafft auf Grundlage bestehender Werke musikalische Kompositionen oder Kunst und generiert realistische 3D-Modelle von Objekten. Sprachmodelle wie GPT-4 können natürliche Konversationen führen, menschliche Schreibstile nachahmen und Bildgeneratoren wie Stable Diffusion erzeugen realistische Bilder und Videos. Das nimmt uns einerseits Arbeit ab, birgt aber auch die Gefahr von Missbrauch, der Verbreitung von Desinformation, Deepfake-Videos und diskriminierenden Inhalten.

Wie aber lässt sich eine Technologie kontrollieren, die sich in diesem Tempo weiterentwickelt? Welche Gesetze werden aktuell in Deutschland und Europa diskutiert – und wohin geht die Entwicklung der KI-Regulierung weltweit?

Am 29. November 2023 gibt Philipp Hacker, Professor für Recht und Ethik der digitalen Gesellschaft an der ENS, im Rahmen der Future Skills-Woche an der Viadrina Einblick in den Stand seiner Forschung und aktuelle Herausforderungen der KI-Regulierung. Der öffentliche Vortrag findet am 29. November von 16:30 -17:30 Uhr im Gräfin-Dönhoff-Gebäude der Europa-Universität Viadrina, Europaplatz 1 in Frankfurt (Oder) im Hörsaal 2 statt.

Are you an entrepreneur? And do you know how to handle data efficiently? Does your start-up have the necessary knowledge to deal with data?

You are welcome to join this workshop organized by our ENS Research Group "Politics & Governance of Digitalization" taking place on 7 November 2023, 9 AM - 3:30 PM in the ENS Coworking Space at Collegium Polonicum in Slubice. It will help you to understand how to govern data in organizations and why this is so crucial.

Guest Speaker: Jan Oleszczuk-Zygmuntowski, Lecturer in Management and Artificial Intelligence at Kozminski University (Warsaw), Programme Director at CoopTech Hub, first Polish center for platform cooperativism, Co-president of the Polish Economics Network

Please register by sending an This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ENS researcher Dr. Filip Bialy has joined the DiCED team at the University of Manchester, which is studying the use of modern digital techniques in election campaigns. DiCED (Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy), is a five-year project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project will be led by Rachel Gibson, a Professor of Political Science from The University of Manchester. The key goal will be to examine how digital technologies and new forms of data are reshaping the electoral landscape and the nature and purpose of political campaigns, in both new and old democracies.

Focusing on the USA, the UK, France, Germany and Poland, DiCED will provide one of the first in-depth comparative analyses of what has been dubbed a new form of ‘data-driven’ political campaigning. It will look at where this new mode of electioneering is emerging, and ask why it is more prominent in certain countries.

Filip Bialy is an Assistant Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan and part of the Science and Technology studies group at ENS. He holds a PhD in political science and a postgraduate diploma in Big Data and data processing. His research focuses on the ethical and political implications of digitalization processes, including the widespread adoption of AI. He was a visiting fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science and in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and currently is a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin.

Many scientists share preprints on social media platforms to gain attention from academic peers, policy-makers, and journalists. In this study we shed light on an unintended but highly consequential effect of sharing preprints: their contribution to conspiracy theories. Although the scientific community might quickly dismiss a preprint as insubstantial and ‘clickbaity’, its uncertain epistemic status nevertheless allows conspiracy theorists to mobilize the text as scientific support for their own narratives.

To better understand the epistemic politics of preprints on social media platforms, a team of authors including ENS researcher Mareike Bauer studied the case of a highly controversial biomedical preprint, which was shared widely on Twitter in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, they compared the structures of engagement with the preprint and the discursive practices of scientists and conspiracy theorists. The authors found that despite substantial engagement, scientists were unable to dampen the conspiracy theorists’ enthusiasm for the preprint. Moreover, they found that members from both groups not only tried to reduce the preprint’s epistemic uncertainty, but sometimes deliberately maintained it. The maintenance of epistemic uncertainty helped conspiracy theorists to reinforce their group’s identity as skeptics and allowed scientists to express concerns with the state of their profession. The study contributes to research on the intricate relations between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online, as well as to the role of social media platforms for new genres of scholarly communication.

Mareike Fenja Bauer is a PhD researcher at ENS. Her research focusses on anti-feminism on visual social media platforms.

Authors: Mareike Fenja Bauer, Dr. Maximilian Heimstädt, Carlos Franzreb and Dr. Sonja Schimmel

Ulrike Klinger, Professor for Digital Democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies / European University Viadrina, will be one of thirteen Thomas Mann Fellows in 2024. In the context of the 2024 election year in the United States, the Fellows will explore issues of democracy and vulnerability. During their stays of several months at the former exile residence of the Mann family, the Thomas Mann House, they will work on their projects in exchange with US experts and the public.

Ulrike Klinger will take a transatlantic perspective on the 2024 election campaigns. In 2024, there will be elections for a new European Parliament in May and U.S. presidential and congressional elections in November. Her project will focus on actors and allegations that challenge the legitimacy of elections themselves, on election fraud campaigns and disinformation about the electoral process.

The Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles is a lively place for transatlantic debate, where outstanding personalities and innovative thinkers explore fundamental political, social, and cultural issues and concerns facing our world today and in the coming years. The Thomas Mann Fellowships enable academics, pioneering thinkers, and intellectuals who live, or have lived, in Germany to tackle the pressing challenges of our time and to foster the intellectual and cultural exchange between Germany and the United States. For a complete list of the 2024 Fellows, click here. 

Ulrike Klinger joined ENS as Professor for Digital Democracy in October 2020. She is also Associated Researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Before joining ENS, she was Professor for Digital Communication at Freie Universität Berlin and head of the research group on “News, campaigns and the rationality of public discourse” at the Weizenbaum Institute. Her research focuses on political communication, the transformation of digital publics, and the role of technologies in democratic societies.

Large Generative AI Models, such as ChatGPT, GPT-4 or Stable Diffusion, are revolutionizing the way we communicate, create, and work. They are rapidly and profoundly impacting all sectors of society, from business development to medicine, from education to research, and from coding to the arts. Like many other transformative technologies, they offer enormous potential, but may also carry significant risks regarding, inter alia, opacity, bias, or fake news.

Against this background, the workshop brings together leading scholars to discuss the far-reaching technical, legal, regulatory and social implications of recent advances in generative AI systems.

It is organized by Professor Sarah Hammer (University of Pennsylvania Law School, USA) and Professor Philipp Hacker (ENS / European University Viadrina). The organizers acknowledge the generous support of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.