TechEthos has established a cluster of 16 EU-funded projects, creating a platform to exchange, collaborate and create synergies together. Some of the projects represented address ethical and societal challenges related to new and emerging technologies – such as TechEthos. Others are purely technical projects but also address ethical and societal challenges. On 4 March 2022, these 16 EU-funded projects came together for an online kick-off meeting. This first meeting allowed us to establish many overlaps particularly highlighting that almost all projects aimed to identify ethical and societal challenges, find legal gaps and develop strategies to close these gaps. Many of the projects want to improve the ethical and legal framework through recommendations, tools and guidelines for users, researchers, ethics bodies, policymakers and other stakeholders. The cluster will continue to intensify its collaboration and work together more concretely to avoid duplicating efforts ensuring the best work is produced from all projects.
Which projects are involved in the cluster?
TechEthos is a Horizon 2020-funded project that addresses how to prioritise ethics and societal values in the development of new and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on three technology areas, namely Neurotechnologies, Climate Engineering and Digital Extended Reality (for more information click here).
For the cluster, we invited projects that are funded by the EU and work either in the field of research ethics or responsible research and innovation (RRI) or work in some way on ethical and/or societal challenges present in one of the three TechEthos technologies.
From the resulting cluster of 16 projects, five projects have a focus on research ethics and/or RRI in general, three projects carry out research in the field of neurotechnology, four in the field of digital augmented reality and four in the field of climate engineering (see figure).
To find out more about the projects involved click here.
What is the future plan for the cluster
At the kick-off meeting, representatives of the 16 projects engaged in lively discussions, which will continue during an in-person meeting in Vienna on 23 May 2022. After that, the cluster aims to regularly exchange progress and ideas in online meetings and work on joint webinars and position papers.
The cluster remains open to further projects. If your projects are interested in exchanging and collaborating with TechEthos and other EU-funded projects, please contact the Horizontal Coordination WP leader Lisa Tambornino (tambornino@eurecnet.eu).
