We are happy to announce that the next PROGRAMme spring workshop will be held on June 8 and 9 2021.
Due to the pandemic the workshop will be held virtually and the format will be slightly different with a more restricted workshop on systems and a roundtable on free software spread over two days.
In order to register, please send a mail to: liesbeth.de-mol@univ-lille.fr indicating which days you would like to participate.
Registration is free but required in order to attend.
June 8 2021: Systems workshop, 14h-17h30
The Systems workshop is the fourth and last in a series of four PROGRAMme workshops. Each of these focuses on one of the project’s main clusters (Logic; Machines; Programming Languages and Notations; Systems). The fourth workshop will focus on “Systems”.
The systems workshop is anchored in the observation that one basic modality of computer programs is its socio-technical modality: programs do not live in a closed technical world but are part of a broader socio-technical system that entails both the internal and the external world. By consequence, systems cannot be simply closed off from the world which implies, amongst others, that systems too have a life (Lehmann 1980).
By consequence, “system” here is not restricted to its more obvious understanding in the programming context, that is, as operating systems, but is interpreted broadly. One major set of questions is then what programs become, how they should be and what they imply when seen as being part of such a broader socio-technical system.
Some more specific questions to be raised are:
– what is a system in the face of programs?
– what does a systemic view tell us about the recent developments in AI?
– is a system always open? What does that mean?
– is it ever possible to have full control over a living system?
– when systems become autonomous how can and should we control their moral and social behavior?
A detailed program, including abstracts, is available here.
Maarten Bullynck (Université de Paris 8), Tomas Petricek (University of Kent) and Julian Rohrhuber (Robert Schumann Hochschule), The system is dead! Long live the system!
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (LIP6, Sorbonne University), From Moral Artificial Agents to Computational Ethics
Géza Kulcsar (InQuery Labs), Clouded Systems: Systems Engineering under the Rule of the Unknown
Teresa Numerico, (Roma Tre University), The late victory of the cybernetical systemic approach in machine intelligence
June 9 2021: Roundtable on free software, 15h-17h
The round-table will aim at discussing free software and the free software movement, around questions such as:
– How to characterize free software? What is its relationship with “free of charge” software?
– What are the links between the free software movement and the software industry? Is their relationship antagonistic or symbiotic?
– What is the link between the enforcement of data privacy rights and the development of free software?
– Is the free software movement necessarily linked to certain political / societal views? Could it be value-neutral? And should it?
Participants are:
Gaël Duval is an entrepeneur deeply involved with open-source software. In the 1990s he created Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux) and co-founded MandrakeSoft. Recently, he created the /e/ mobile operating system, which is free and open-source and stripped of the proprietary Google apps. In 2018 he also founded the E foundation which maintains /e/.
Bastien Guerry is the free software officer for the French public administration. He first studied philosophy and cognitive sciences. He got interested in the free software movement in the late 90’s and taught himself how to program by contributing to GNU Emacs. In 2008, he got involved in the One Laptop Per Child initiative and was recruited by Wikimedia France as its first employee in 2010. In 2017, he joined the “Public Interest Entrepreneurs”, a program led by Etalab, the French mission for open gov/data. There he discovered the challenges faced by public agencies when it comes to maintaining and enhancing resilient IT infrastructures, recruiting tech profiles, rationalizing the use of “open source” and the contributions made by the public administration to the larger free software ecosystem.
Dr. Martin Carlé lives as a musicologist, media theorist and a Linux enthusiast. His cultural objective is to leverage Literate Programming techniques as a performative methodology for experimental media arts and reproducible research in the digital humanities.
The round-table will be moderated by Selmer Bringsjord. Selmer is Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Logic & Philosophy and Management, and Director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning (RAIR) Lab.
The roundtable is organized by Henri Stephanou, Selmer Bringsjord and Liesbeth De Mol.