Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center

Dear Friends,

My name is Kirsten Martin, and I’m the director of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, or
what we like to call ND TEC.

What are tech ethics? In essence, they’re the idea that it’s not enough to ask whether a new
technology can be developed, that we also need to be able to answer questions like what types
of technologies should be developed, how, and for what reasons.

Such questions are more than thought exercises. Because while the use of AI and other
technologically enhanced systems continues to grow at a rapid rate, the understanding of how
these systems make decisions and the values that may be encoded in them is often lacking.

ND TEC is a new center at Notre Dame, established in 2019, and one of the ways we try to make
tech ethics issues more accessible is through our TEC Talks podcast. Each episode features a
conversation between another scholar and me about a recent book or paper by that guest.
Prior to the podcast, TEC Talks was a virtual live event series, and all podcast episodes and
event videos are available through both the ThinkND and ND TEC websites. You can find the
podcast in all the major podcast apps, as well.

This fall, the center launched what we expect will become one of our signature programs, the
undergraduate minor in tech ethics. The minor is open to any undergraduate at Notre Dame,
regardless of major, and invites students to tackle topics ranging from how we prevent bias in
decisions made by computers and whether we can do anything to fight online mis- and
disinformation to what institutions owe us when it comes to protecting our data.

In terms of research, our affiliated faculty—who number approximately 30 and come from over
a dozen academic units at Notre Dame—publish in a diverse range of both disciplines and
outlets. ND TEC’s online publications library is a one-stop shop for scholars and the general
public alike to easily access our affiliates’ work in tech ethics.

ND TEC also houses an exciting collaboration between the academy and industry called the
Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab. Among other projects, we together sponsor a
Technology Ethics Postdoctoral Fellows Program that brings talented early career scholars to
Notre Dame to research and teach in the undergraduate minor.

I hope you’ll have the opportunity to check out some of the items I’ve linked to above, and
regardless, thank you for taking a couple of minutes out of your weekend to learn about what
we’re up to at ND TEC.

Sincerely,