
Ethics4Challenges Project: Talk with Dr. Silvia Milano
On Thursday, 22.05.2025, from 16:00 to 17:30, the ENS Chair for Sociology of Technology will host a hybrid event in the ENS Coworking Space as part of the Erasmus+ Project ETHICS4CHALLENGES. Online participation will be possible.
In this event, Dr. Silvia Milano, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter (UK) and a Humboldt Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCM), LMU Munich, will give a talk with the title "Epistemic obstacles to the governance of algorithmic systems." In this talk, she will introduce the phenomenon of epistemic fragmentation and describe how it creates obstacles for the governance of algorithmic systems that profile and interact with individuals. Using the example of online personalised targeting, she shows how epistemic fragmentation amplifies the harms individuals are exposed to, leads to epistemic injustice, and cannot be tackled using current regulatory strategies. She invites us to rethink a civic governance model for algorithmic systems as an antidote.
Dr. Milano's research interests are in the Epistemology and Ethics of AI. Her recent work has focused on AI and epistemic injustice, the ethical challenges of recommender systems, polarisation on social networks, and the impacts of LLMs on education. She is currently developing a philosophical analysis of recommender systems, encompassing their social, epistemological, and ethical dimensions.
Dr. Milano was previously a Golding Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College and Research Fellow in Philosophy of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford (2020-2022), and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute (2018-2020). She obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
We warmly welcome participants from all backgrounds—students, faculty, and anyone interested in the topic—to join this English-language event.
For those planning to participate online, the Zoom link will be published shortly.