HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-22: eXtended Reality for Industry 5.0 (IA) (Type 1)
Notable practical areas of expertise involve execution of ethical impact assessments, devising ethical guidelines, value sensitive design, digital hermeneutics, participatory research, and ongoing and dynamic ethics monitoring and advice.
The proposed contribution would involve leading or providing substantial support to ethics work towards the realisation of ethical XR technologies and applications of those technologies that support moral and social values and adhere to ethical principles.
Several pathways towards ensuring responsible research and innovation are available stemming from the expertise of the proposed contributors, and subject to discussion with consortium partners depending on their identified needs:
1) Establishing and liaising with an independent ethics board of relevant experts for the project to provide independent advice and review of project deliverables and materials;
2) Executing periodic ethical and societal impact assessments in order to identify ethical issues stemming from project activities, both internal (during the project’s lifetime and with concern for immediately affected stakeholders) and external impacts (longer term impacts extending beyond the project life-cycle). Such impact assessments would provide a structured and collaborative opportunity to evaluate potential project impacts (both positive and negative) around the themes of privacy, health and safety, fairness, transparency, sustainability and so on;
3) Devising ethical guidelines to facilitate ethical decision making in the design, use and testing of XR applications, with reference to the particularities of intended use cases;
4) Provision of ethics training and seminars (or webinars) to familiarise practitioners with important ethical concepts to further facilitate ethical decision-making for responsible design and deployment of XR applications;
5) Provision of ethics monitoring and management by acting as a point of contact for consortium partners’ ethical queries and concerns, supporting informed consent procedures if necessary, raising ethics awareness proactively and other activities as needs dictate.
The proposed contributors would also engage in dissemination and knowledge exchange activities as required, with the intention of participating in academic/industry conferences and publishing research results in peer reviewed academic journals, as well as through other means decided in collaboration with project partners.
The proposed contributors have an interest in exploring the method of virtuous practice design, which is to say that as well as helping design technologies that adhere to ethical principles and values, they are interested in also supporting the design of practices that use these technologies that support the virtues.
It is anticipated that all activities would be collaborative, involving input, feedback and discussion with all project partners, and involving the participation and input of external stakeholders insofar as possible.