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The drive for autonomous technology spans from workplaces to personal lives, promising breakthroughs in safety, healthcare, and daily conveniences. But this raises a crucial question: What happens to human autonomy? And how to enhance it through design? Historically seen as a tool to enhance our freedom, today’s technology risks undermining human control and agency.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the ERC Starting Grants for young researchers. This European grant of €1.5 million for a five-year research programme is intended to enable individual scientists to build their own teams and pursue innovative projects. TPM researchers Michael Klenk and Giacomo Marangoni have been awarded the ERC Starting Grant for their groundbreaking research.

To close of its annual theme year on Design for Justice, the Delft Design for Values Institute has published a white paper on the topic.

“What is life? How does a living cell emerge from lifeless molecules?” wondered a multidisciplinary team of Dutch scientists. To answer these questions the research team, led by the TU Delft, aims to build a living synthetic cell from lifeless biomolecules, using laboratory evolution and artificial intelligence for the first time. The ten-year research programme to do so, entitled “Evolving life from non-life” or simply “EVOLF”, was awarded 40 million euro by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the Summit grants scheme.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly common in job recruitment, offering automated online interviews and skill-assessment games. These tools promise efficiency and bias reduction but raise concerns about their validity, reliability and ethical implications. Research by Evgeni Aizenberg, Matthew J. Dennis and Jeroen van den Hoven sheds light on the assumptions underpinning AI hiring assessments.

The Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) and TU Delft invite PhD candidates in philosophy to register for the Summer School The Ethics of Influence to take place on July 22– 26, 2024.