The NYU Center for Bioethics is pleased to welcome submissions of abstracts for its 1st Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday, April 3, 2020.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, including (but not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Frances Kamm.
There will be four additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes coverage of travel expenses (up to $500, plus accommodation for two nights) as well as an award of $500. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm EST on Friday, January 24, 2020. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review and should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Notification of acceptance will take place via email by Friday, February 14, 2020.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting four additional participants to serve as commentators.
The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program will launch with a roundtable discussion between program directors Becca Franks and Jeff Sebo and program affiliates Christine Webb, Colin Jerolmack, and Dale Jamieson. The discussion will cover an array of topics including: Why does wild animal welfare matter more than ever? What are the most urgent and actionable issues confronting wild animals? and How does wild animal welfare relate to conservation biology and other fields? We will also have plenty of time for discussion with the audience
About the panelists
Becca Franks is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU. She was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow with the Animal Welfare Program at UBC, where she was awarded the Killam Research Prize. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental and animal protection, specializing in animal behavior, aquatic animal welfare, quantitative methods, and human-animal relationships. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, commentaries, and book chapters, she co-edited a special issue for the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science and is an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Jeff Sebo is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at NYU. Jeff is author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Christine Webb is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. A broadly trained primatologist with expertise in social behavior, motivation, and emotion, her recent work centers on consolation and empathy in our close primate cousins across several sanctuary and wild settings. Her research and teaching also engage critically with questions in animal and environmental ethics, particularly in deconstructing anthropocentric biases that affect the way we approach primatology, science, and our relationship with the natural world more broadly.
Colin Jerolmack is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at NYU. He is also the current Chair of Environmental Studies there. His research examines how relationships with animals and nature shape social life in the city, among other topics. He is author of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town (2021) and The Global Pigeon (2013). He is also author of many articles on sociology, animals, and the environment, and he is editor of the Animals in Context series for NYU Press and an executive committee member of the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection.
Dale Jamieson is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at NYU. He has published more than 100 articles and chapters, including Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed—and What It Means For Our Future (2014), Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (2008), and Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (2002). He is also on the boards of several journals and has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and more.
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
Poets and singers in a number of medieval vernacular languages reached non-native audiences and inspired speakers of other languages to compose in theirs; and many imagined their compositions enjoying a universality similar to that of cosmopolitan languages like Latin and Arabic. An interesting rationalization of these aspirations can be discerned in a short verse narrative of a well-known episode in the youth of Alexander the Great, conqueror of India, together with his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. Not only does it involve Greeks and Indians singing French songs and cosplaying French lovers, but the philosopher is induced to pretend to be a horse and then justifies his behavior as “natural,” with far-reaching implications which this talk will explore.
Sarah Kay is Professor Emerita in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. In Spring 2023, she is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Columbia Society of Senior Scholars.
This talk is presented by the Columbia Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Society of Senior Scholars, the Department of Music, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The New York University Center for Bioethics is pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for the 3rd Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday and Saturday, April 28-29, 2023.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, broadly understood. This includes (but is not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, public health ethics, gender and race in bioethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Professor Ruth Chang, University of Oxford. There will be five additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes an award of $500, and may include coverage of travel expenses, depending upon university policies at the time of the award. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday, January 22, 2023. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review, and papers should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Email notifications will be sent out by Friday, February 10, 2023.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator-chair in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting five additional participants to serve as commentator-chairs.
This year’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop is organized by S. Matthew Liao, Daniel Fogal, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Stephanie Beardman, Dan Khokar, and Jonathan Knutzen of the NYU Center for Bioethics.
The International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI) series has established itself as the world’s premier research conference on Brain Informatics, which is an emerging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field that combines the efforts of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to explore the main problems that lie in the interplay between human brain studies and informatics research.
The 16th International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI’23) provides a premier international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative and practical development experiences on brain Informatics research, brain-inspired technologies and brain/mental health applications.
The key theme of the conference is “Brain Science meets Artificial Intelligence“.
The BI’23 solicits high-quality original research and application papers (both full paper and abstract submissions). Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- Track 1: Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Brain Science
- Track 2: Human Information Processing Systems
- Track 3: Brain Big Data Analytics, Curation and Management
- Track 4: Informatics Paradigms for Brain and Mental Health Research
- Track 5: Brain-Machine Intelligence and Brain-Inspired Computing
Keynote Speakers
Professor Emery N. Brown
MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
Profile: Emery Neal Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a practicing anesthesiologist at MGH. At MIT he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Director of the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Brown is one of only 19 individuals who has been elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the first African American and the first anesthesiologist to be elected to all three National Academies.
Professor Bin He
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Profile: Bin He is the Trustee Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of the Neuroscience Institute, and Professor by courtesy of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. He has made significant research and education contributions to the field of neuroengineering and biomedical imaging, including functional biomedical imaging, noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), and noninvasive neuromodulation. His pioneering research has helped transforming electroencephalography from a 1-dimensional detection technique to 3-dimensional neuroimaging modality. His lab demonstrated for the first time for humans to fly a drone and control a robotic arm just by thinking about it using a noninvasive BCI. He is an elected Fellow of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and IEEE. Dr. He served as a Past President of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering from 2013-2018, the Chair of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering from 2018-2021. Dr. He has been a Member of NIH BRAIN Initiative Multi-Council Working Group from 2014-2019.
Professor John Ngai
NIH BRAIN Initiative, USA
Profile: John J. Ngai, Ph.D., is the Director of the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Dr. Ngai earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before starting his faculty position at the University of California at Berkeley. During more than 25 years as a Berkeley faculty member, Dr. Ngai has trained 20 undergraduate students, 24 graduate students and 15 postdoctoral fellows in addition to teaching well over 1,000 students in the classroom. His work has led to the publication of more than 70 scientific articles in some of the field’s most prestigious journals and 10 U.S. and international patents. Dr. Ngai has received many awards including from the Sloan Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. As a faculty member, Dr. Ngai has served as the director of Berkeley’s Neuroscience Graduate Program and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He has also provided extensive service on NIH study sections, councils and steering groups, including as previous co-chair of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Consortium Steering Group. Dr. Ngai oversees the long-term strategy and day-to-day operations of the NIH BRAIN Initiative as it strives to revolutionize our understanding of the brain in both health and disease.
Professor Helen Mayberg
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
Profile: Helen Mayberg is a neurologist recognized for her neuroimaging studies of brain circuits in depression and their translation to the development of deep brain stimulation as a novel therapeutic for treatment resistant patients. Born and raised in Southern California, she received a BA in Psychobiology from UCLA and a MD from the University of Southern California, then trained in Neurology at Columbia’s Neurological Institute in New York and did a research fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins. She had early academic appointments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, held the inaugural Sandra Rotman Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University of Toronto, the first Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric Imaging and Therapeutics at Emory University and is now the Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine where she is founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics. She is a member of the both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine as well as the National Academy of Inventors and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Vinod Goel
York University, Canada
Profile: Vinod Goel is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at York University, Toronto, Canada. He completed his PhD in cognitive science at UC-Berkeley, and received postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the NIH (NINDS) and the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, UCL, UK. He has made significant empirical contributions to our understanding of the roles of prefrontal cortex in real-world problem solving and reasoning, hemispheric asymmetry in prefrontal cortex, and models of rationality, using the methodologies of fMRI and lesion studies. He has most recently completed a book reconstructing the role of rationality in human behavior entitled “Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics” (The MIT Press, 2022). His current project is to explore the implications of this work on our understanding of reason and legal responsibility.
Professor Amy Kuceyeski
Cornell University, USA
Profile: Amy Kuceyeski is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Neuroscience in Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Computational Biology Department at Cornell University. She is the director of the Computational Connectomics (CoCo) Laboratory and the Machine Learning in Medicine group at Cornell. Over the past 14 years, she has been working to understand the human brain using quantitative modeling approaches, including machine learning, to map anatomical and physiological characteristics to behavior. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how brains recover from injury so we can devise strategies, possibly via non-invasive neuromodulation, to support natural recovery processes. She also performs research at the intersection of biological and artificial neural networks that aims to understand how human brains process incoming visual information.
Professor Patrick Purdon
Harvard Medical School, USA
Profile: Patrick L. Purdon, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and the Nathaniel M. Sims Endowed Chair in Anesthesia Innovation and Bioengineering at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Purdon received his A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard College in 1996, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from MIT in 2005. Dr. Purdon’s research in neuroengineering encompasses the mechanisms of anesthesia, Alzheimer’s disease and brain health, anesthesia and the developing brain, neural signal processing, and the development of novel technologies for brain monitoring. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, is an inventor on 16 pending patents, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Purdon has won numerous awards, including the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.
Important Dates
- 15 April 2023: Full paper submission deadline
- 20 April 2023: Workshop proposal deadline
- 10 May 2023: Abstract presentation submission deadline
- 30 May 2023: Final paper and abstract acceptance notification
- 20 Jun 2023: Accepted paper and abstract registration deadline
- 1-3 Aug 2023: The Brain Informatics Conference
Paper Submission and Publications
Full Paper (Regular):
1. 9-12 pages are strongly encouraged for the regular papers including figures and references in Springer LNCS Proceedings format(https://www.springer.com/us/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Over length papers will be charged for 100$ per page.
2. All papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted based on originality, significance of contribution, technical merit, and presentation quality.
3. All papers accepted (and all workshop & special sessions’ full-length papers) will be published by Springer as a volume of the Springer-Nature LNAI Brain Informatics Book Series(https://link.springer.com/conference/brain).
Abstract (Only for Workshops/Special Sessions):
Research abstracts are encouraged and will be accepted for presentations in an oral presentation format and/or poster presentation format. Each abstract submission should include the title of the paper and an abstract body within 500 words. The abstract will not be included in the conference proceedings to be published by Springer.
Journal Opportunities:
High-quality BI conference papers will be nominated for a fast-track review and publication at the Brain Informatics Journal, (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/) an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Open Access journal published by Springer Nature. Discount or no open access article-processing fee will be charged for BI conference paper authors.
Special Issues & Books Opportunities:
Workshop/special session organizers and BI conference session chairs may consider and can be invited to prepare a book proposal of special topics for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics & Health Book Series (https://www.springer.com/series/15148), or a special issue at the Brain Informatics Journal.
Poster-Conference Publication
1. Accepted full papers will be selected to publish in the Brain Informatics Journal upon revision.
2. Discount or no article-processing fee will be charged for authors of Brain Informatics conference (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/).
3. The organizers of Workshops and Special-Sessions are invited to prepare a book proposal based on the topics of the workshop/special session for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics and Health book series (http://www.springer.com/series/15148).
Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in NLP, AI, and Vision including neuro-symbolic integration, language grounding with vision and interactions, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of 2 Test of Time Awards (at ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021), 7 Best/Outstanding Paper Awards (at ACL 2023, NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013), the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch in 2016.
The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.
Join us for a special live taping of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Host Spencer Greenberg and guest Jeff Sebo will discuss the moral status of insects and AI systems, as well as other thorny questions in global priorities research.
About the speakers
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Spencer Greenberg is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides 70 free, digital tools to help people make better decisions and improve their lives, as well as the host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Spencer is also the founder of Spark Wave, an organization that conducts psychology research and builds psychology-related products designed to help benefit the world. He has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and his work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Gizmodo, and more.
Thank you to Effective Altruism New York City for their generous support of this event.
The New York University Center for Bioethics is pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for the 4th Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday and Saturday, May 3-4, 2024.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, broadly understood. This includes (but is not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, public health ethics, gender and race in bioethics, and clinical ethics.
Our keynote speaker will be Professor Shelly Kagan, Yale University. There will be five additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes an award of $500, and may include coverage of travel expenses, depending upon university policies at the time of the award. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review, and papers should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Email notifications of acceptance will be sent out by Friday, February 16, 2024.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator-chair in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting five additional participants to serve as commentator-chairs.
This year’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop is organized by S. Matthew Liao, Daniel Fogal, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Dan Khokar, and Jonathan Knutzen of the NYU Center for Bioethics.