Make Way for the Robots! Human‑ and Machine‑Centricity in Constituting a European Public–Private Partnership

This article is an analytic register of recent European efforts in the making of ‘autonomous’ robots to address what is imagined as Europe’s societal challenges. The paper describes how an emerging techno-epistemic network stretches across industry, science, policy and law to legitimize and enact a robotics innovation agenda. Roadmap is the main metaphor and organizing tool in working across the disciplines and sectors, and in aligning these heterogeneous actors with a machine-centric vision along a path to make way for ‘new kinds’ of robots. We describe what happens as this industry-dominated project docks in a public–private partnership with pan-European institutions and a legislative initiative on robolaw. Emphasizing the co-production of robotics and European innovation politics, we observe how well-known uncertainties and scholarly debates about machine capabilities and human–machine configurations, are unexpectedly played out in legal scholarship and institutions as a controversy and a significant problem for human-centered legal frameworks. European robotics are indeed driving an increase in speculative ethics and a new-found weight of possible futures in legislative practice.publishedVersio

Unravelling project ecologies of innovation: A review of BIM policy and diffusion

As the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM) gains traction in the construction industry, many studies have been attracted to understanding its adoption in firms (micro-level), implementation in projects (intermediate level), and diffusion across the industry (macro-level). This is a theoretical paper which mobilises contextual theories from Social Science and Project Management, such as institutional logics and project ecologies respectively, to map and rationalise the various social layers activated in diffusing BIM innovation across different national contexts (countries). Drawing upon data about Anglo-Saxon and corporatist-type national business systems, there is currently a mismatch between their BIM innovation diffusion strategy – which unfolds in a top-down and bottom-up manner respectively –, and their intended outcomes. This study highlighted that the diffusion of BIM innovation has been seen as disruptive in the United Kingdom and incremental in countries such as the Netherlands and Norway. Apart from mapping various social layers activated in BIM diffusion, this study outlines implication for policy-makers and practitioners, by stressing that not only global solutions for BIM diffusion are probably misguided, but re-establishing the links between project and context is a comprehensive approach to dismiss the rhetoric of BIM panacea and a sensible way to increase BIM diffusion and effective BIM implementation in project

Realizing Wokeness -- White Schools, White Ignorance: Toward a Racially Responsive Pedagogy

The purpose of this research is to construct a comprehensive, analytic framework to clarify the construct of white ignorance and then illustrate how the framework can be applied to education research, theory and practice. To develop the framework, I consolidate and synthesize the extant literature around white ignorance, delineating a typology and conceptual vocabulary for the three core elements of the construct: 1) doxastic white ignorance, 2) active white ignorance, and 3) meta-white ignorance. Then, I show its application. First, I illustrate how researchers can use the framework to guide investigation into the ways that mostly white schools operate to reproduce and sustain white ignorance. Next, I illustrate how teachers can use the framework to combat and undermine the proliferation of white ignorance in their school and classroom. Toward that end, I develop a conception of wokeness, conceived not as the absence of ignorance but as the recognition of one’s own ignorance and the capacity to neutralize its effect on one’s judgment. Finally, I show how teacher educators can use the framework to transform the way we prepare teachers for social justice education. Ultimately, my project conceptualizes an approach called "racially responsive pedagogy," which serves to formalize a common diagnostic and pedagogical methodology between culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies and anti-white ignorance pedagogies. In mostly nonwhite schools, white supremacist patterns of practice promote subtractive schooling and cultural erasure. In response, culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies are warranted to reincorporate indigenous epistemologies back into the classroom. In mostly white schools, it’s the inverse. White supremacist patterns of practice promote white ignorance, which educators should work to resist and exclude. A racially responsive pedagogy elevates racial analyses, inviting educators to decode white supremacist patterns of practice, so they can activate a response and confidently advance their social justice mission regardless of the context in which they teach

LGBT Rights in the EU

The thesis examines the protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the European Union (EU). After accession to the EU, one of the EU’s most powerful weapons for ensuring adaption into the EU norms and rules - conditionality - is lost. In some EU Member States, the EU norm of non-discrimination against sexual minorities has not yet been successfully adopted. Using Europeanisation theory as a theoretical framework, the thesis aims at examining what tools the EU have at its disposal to ensure that the norm of non-discrimination against sexual minorities is adopted in all its Member States. More specifically, in the absence of external incentives, does the EU use mechanisms of social learning? The study conclude that the EU do use social learning, along with other mechanisms, but could benefit from having a strategic framework for LGBT issues within the Union

Agoric computation: trust and cyber-physical systems

In the past two decades advances in miniaturisation and economies of scale have led to the emergence of billions of connected components that have provided both a spur and a blueprint for the development of smart products acting in specialised environments which are uniquely identifiable, localisable, and capable of autonomy. Adopting the computational perspective of multi-agent systems (MAS) as a technological abstraction married with the engineering perspective of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has provided fertile ground for designing, developing and deploying software applications in smart automated context such as manufacturing, power grids, avionics, healthcare and logistics, capable of being decentralised, intelligent, reconfigurable, modular, flexible, robust, adaptive and responsive. Current agent technologies are, however, ill suited for information-based environments, making it difficult to formalise and implement multiagent systems based on inherently dynamical functional concepts such as trust and reliability, which present special challenges when scaling from small to large systems of agents. To overcome such challenges, it is useful to adopt a unified approach which we term agoric computation, integrating logical, mathematical and programming concepts towards the development of agent-based solutions based on recursive, compositional principles, where smaller systems feed via directed information flows into larger hierarchical systems that define their global environment. Considering information as an integral part of the environment naturally defines a web of operations where components of a systems are wired in some way and each set of inputs and outputs are allowed to carry some value. These operations are stateless abstractions and procedures that act on some stateful cells that cumulate partial information, and it is possible to compose such abstractions into higher-level ones, using a publish-and-subscribe interaction model that keeps track of update messages between abstractions and values in the data. In this thesis we review the logical and mathematical basis of such abstractions and take steps towards the software implementation of agoric modelling as a framework for simulation and verification of the reliability of increasingly complex systems, and report on experimental results related to a few select applications, such as stigmergic interaction in mobile robotics, integrating raw data into agent perceptions, trust and trustworthiness in orchestrated open systems, computing the epistemic cost of trust when reasoning in networks of agents seeded with contradictory information, and trust models for distributed ledgers in the Internet of Things (IoT); and provide a roadmap for future developments of our research