Högskolan i Skövde

När forskare flyr Trumps USA får Europa inte missa chansen att ta emot dem. Nu finns en unik möjlighet för Sverige att bygga ut grundforskningen i en historiskt snabb expansion och rekrytera hundratals amerikanska forskare. Det skriver Oskar MacGregor och Maurice Lamb vid Högskolan i Skövde.

Den artificiella intelligensens intåg i högre utbildning har fått Universitetslärarens krönikör att ändra arbetssätt. Både när det gäller att formulera frågor till tentor och vad han tittar på när han rättar dem.

"I now need to develop questions that will stump an AI but not a knowledgeable human." Universitetsläraren's columnist Oskar MacGregor has changed the way he formulates examination tasks.

In this chapter, we discuss the ethics of choosing not to use the Internet, despite both having full access and being fully competent to do so. Our investigation consists of a comparative case study of the current situations in Slovakia and Sweden, two European Union (EU) countries that inhabit opposite ends on a European spectrum of societal digitalisation. We begin by grounding our discussion in the weight that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ascribe to education and healthcare, as a means of establishing the inherent ethical value of universal access to these two sectors. Next, we elucidate three ethical arguments that all support the general choice to not use the Internet. Then, we provide a brief overview of the state of digitalisation in Slovak and Swedish education and healthcare, respectively, before applying the three arguments to these specific, real-world cases. We end by concluding with some general ethical reflections on the various sorts of everyday situations that increasingly require individuals to use the Internet, regardless whether they prefer not to.

INGENIUM är en allians av tio lärosäten från tio europeiska länder. Europauniversitetet strävar efter att göra det möjligt för varje medlem i nätverket att erbjuda högkvalitativa studie- och kvalifikationsprogram med digitala komponenter som delas inom INGENIUM Alliance.

Vid universitet och högskolor läggs allt större vikt vid att främja god forskningssed inom alla aspekter av forskning1,2, inräknat allt från grundforskning till tillämpad forskning och kommersialisering. Forskningsetik (FE) och forskningsintegritet (FI) stödjer forskningsverksamhet och excellens och anses utgöra en viktig grund för att forskare ska kunna lita på varandra och på forskningsresultaten3 samt stärka allmänhetens förtroende för vetenskap och vetenskapliga resultat4. Men med tanke på de många riktlinjer på hög nivå som finns är det nödvändigt att utveckla ett formellt uttalande för att möjliggöra ett konsekvent tillvägagångssätt för FE och FI i hela INGENIUM.

Eftersom FE och FI är relevanta för forskning inom alla discipliner är det kritiskt att ett formellt uttalande om god forskningssed bygger på erfarenhet från flera discipliner. För att tillfredsställa detta behov har INGENIUM-alliansen stött skapandet av MARIE: Multidisciplinary Approach to Research Integrity and Ethics, som lett utvecklingen av The Munster Statement. Syftet med uttalandet är att stödja forskare över hela INGENIUM genom att förordna ett stadigt engagemang för tydliga och konsekventa FE- och FI-principer på alla nivåer i alla samarbeten. I detta åtagande bör man i möjligaste mån undvika att oredlighet i forskning eller andra avvikelser från god forskningssed förekommer.

MARIE är ett projekt finansierat av INGENIUM Research Groups 2024, med en samlad medlemsexpertis som sträcker sig över många områden, inklusive matematik, teknik, informatik, artificiell intelligens, neurovetenskap, hälso- och sjukvård, bioetik, tillämpad etik och sociologi. Genom att använda MARIE-medlemmarnas samlade tvärvetenskapliga kunskap om tillämpningen av FE och FI för att ytterligare förankra god forskningssed säkerställs att resultaten från MARIE kommer till nytta för flera discipliner inom INGENIUM-alliansen, vilket befäster INGENIUMs roll i framkanten av FE- och FI-initiativ. Genom att arbeta tillsammans och kollektivt över hela INGENIUM-alliansen med FE- och FI-frågor, samt efter input från lokala intressenter, utvecklade vi, medlemmarna i MARIE-projektet, The Munster Statement.

The Munster Statement beskriver principerna för FE och FI, tillsammans med de närliggande termerna oredlighet i forskning och avvikelser från god forskningssed, harmoniserat över INGENIUM, och bör läsas tillsammans med lokala och nationella forskningsrelaterade riktlinjer och förfaranden.

The Munster Statement stöds av INGENIUM Research School.

1 All European Academies. (2023). The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity – Revised Edition. Berlin. https://doi.org/10.26356/ECOC

2 Science Europe (2022). Position Statement: A Values Framework for the Organisation of Research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6637848

3 Science Europe (2015). Briefing Paper on Research Integrity: What it Means, Why it Is Important and How We Might Protect It. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5060051

4 Science Europe. (2015). Seven Reasons to Care about Integrity in Research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5060024

Episodic memories of emotionally salient and personally significant events are often incorporated into dreams, although rarely replayed identically to the original waking event except in replicative posttraumatic nightmares. We investigated, in five Swedish female 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami survivors, how episodic memories of the catastrophe were reflected in their dreams after trauma, both in retrospectively recalled nightmares and bad dreams, and in prospective dream diaries completed several months after the catastrophe. We also assessed whether the emotional and threatening dream content differed between the trauma and a matched control group. Based on the threat simulation theory, we predicted that the trauma group dreams would portray notable similarities with elements related to the original tsunami trauma, and that the trauma group would demonstrate a higher prevalence of negative emotional states, and a higher frequency of threatening dream events as well as more severe threats in their dreams. Only the first hypothesis was partially supported, with retrospective nightmares bearing higher similarity to the trauma experience than the prospective dream diary dreams. However, we observed no statistically significant differences in emotional or threatening dream content between the groups, suggesting that the trauma group participants were not suffering from significant posttraumatic dreaming at the time of systematic dream data collection. Yet, specific features of the trauma group dreams might be interpreted as remnants of episodic tsunami-related memories: Their dreams had a higher percentage of life-threatening events depicting realistic but improbable threats, and an analysis of water-related themes evidenced stressful themes related to waves.

Sverige behöver utveckla en etikprövning som hanterar olika discipliner på olika sätt. Och som inte bygger på en svartvit legalistisk syn på etik. Det skriver Oskar MacGregor, etikexpert inom Horisont Europa

If a technology being used by elite athletes to gain a competitive edge marks some sort of coming of age for said technology, then I suppose electrical and magnetic brain stimulation has now, it would seem, finally come of age. Gone are the days of debilitating One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoo's-Nest-style electroshock jolts, replaced by sleek and sexy marketing for low-current "cognitive enhancement" devices, promising everything from improved focus to - as revealed by a quick traipse through Google and Reddit - increased creativity and intelligence, as well as helping you both win competitions and quit smoking while you're at it! And with this development, an attendant fear of its misuse, for creating unfair advantages - not least among elite athletes, with their federations' obsessive focus on (certain specific forms of) fairness - to the point that the journal Neuroethics recently dedicated a special issue to this topic of "neurodoping". But, perhaps not too surprisingly, reality doesn't really live up to the hype. While various individual studies can be found to support the view that brain stimulation might enhance performance, this takes place against a broad backdrop of serious issues within empirical neuroscience and psychology more generally, relating to all manner of problems with sample sizes, methods, assumptions, etc., along with some plain old ignorance about how to properly deal with all of these. In this talk, I will therefore give the briefest of introductions as to why essentially all existing claims about the purportedly performance-enhancing effects of transcranial electric stimulation (TES) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are claiming far too much, far too soon. As far as we really know, based on what robust evidence actually exists today, "neurodoping" of this sort gives no more a competitive advantage than does rubbing your lucky rabbit's foot.

Persuasion is a process that aims to utilize (true or false) information to change people’s attitudes in relation to something, usually as a precursor to behavioural change. Its use is prevalent in democratic societies, which do not, in principle, permit censorship of information or the use of force to enact power. The transition of information to the internet, particularly with the rise of social media, together with the capacity to capture, store and process big data, and advances in machine learning, have transformed the way modern persuasion is conducted. This has led to new opportunities for persuaders, but also to well-documented instances of abuse: fake news, Cambridge Analytica, foreign interference in elections, etc. We investigate large-scale technology-based persuasion, with the help of three case studies derived from secondary sources, in order to identify and describe the underlying technology architecture and propose issues for future research, including a number of ethical concerns.

In this study, we explored how contextual information about threat dynamics affected the electrophysiological correlates of face perception. Forty-six healthy native Swedish speakers read verbal descriptions signaling an immediate vs delayed intent to escalate or deescalate an interpersonal conflict. Each verbal description was followed by a face with an angry or neutral expression, for which participants rated valence and arousal. Affective ratings confirmed that the emotional intent expressed in the descriptions modulated emotional reactivity to the facial stimuli in the expected direction. The electrophysiological data showed that compared to neutral faces, angry faces resulted in enhanced early and late event-related potentials (VPP, P300 and LPP). Additionally, emotional intent and temporal immediacy modulated the VPP and P300 similarly across angry and neutral faces, suggesting that they influence early face perception independently of facial affect. By contrast, the LPP amplitude to faces revealed an interaction between facial expression and emotional intent. Deescalating descriptions eliminated the LPP differences between angry and neutral faces. Together, our results suggest that information about a person's intentions modulates the processing of facial expressions.