Current and past working groups
Current working groups
The group of female AI researchers will address the question of how human-AI teaming can evolve beneficially over time within organizations. This involves understanding the psychological and social dynamics involved in human-AI collaboration, such as trust, team cohesion, and shared mental models. We will explore how these dynamics change over time and how they can be predicted and explored through research design choices.
We will use scenario techniques to work on potential future scenarios of human-AI teaming in the workplace. This will involve analyzing the temporal dynamics of AI implementation in work teams, focusing on the evolution of trust, team cohesion, and shared mental models. We will also discuss normatively desirable and potentially conceivable visions of human-AI teaming in the future.
As social media platforms increasingly take on roles and responsibilities traditionally associated with nation states, new frameworks to evaluate their fragility must be developed. Using The Fund For Peace’s Fragile State Index as a model, Haythornthwaite, Mai & Gruzd (2024) articulated the Social Media Fragility Indicators, a set of indicators to measure and evaluate the fragility of social media platforms. Building on this, the working group will discuss and refine the proposed indicators. The overarching goal is to develop a robust framework that can provide prescient insights into the long-term viability of platforms, inform strategic interventions, and highlight cross-platform issues.
To advance this work, the working group will convene a set of international experts from diverse fields to evaluate the sources of social media fragility, refine the initial set of indicators of social media fragility, and devise measures to assess the fragility of social media platforms based on these indicators.
This working group explores how academic platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Medium shape the visibility of marginalized scholars – particularly women and non-binary individuals from the Global South. While these platforms promise greater access and engagement, they often reinforce existing inequalities through algorithmic bias, competitive scoring systems, and limited accessibility. Their goal is to understand how these digital environments impact the scholarly presence of underrepresented voices and to develop strategies that make academic platforms more inclusive. The project includes a user-focused survey and interviews, drawing from feminist theory and labor studies to evaluate the technical and social aspects of platform design.
This project will research online gendered hate such as digital sexisms and gender-based online violence. They are particularly interested in visual misogynistic practices that “fly under the radar”. These include content moderation of visual gender violence; visual performance of gender identities, i.e. stereotyping, diminishing, branding, reinforcing imaginaries; and the role of aesthetics and design in (re)generating gender violence (Özkula et al., 2024). The meeting at CAIS is intended to provide an opportunity to contrast and combine our collective methods and develop a methodology that better captures the complexity and diversity of cases of Platformed Visual Misogyny through comparative and multi-modal approaches (for which the groundwork has been laid in Özkula, Prieto-Blanco, Tan, & Mdege, 2024).
How is artificial intelligence reshaping the way political parties operate, engage with citizens, and lead in democratic systems? Our working group, Rethinking Party Politics: The Impact of AI on Governance, Membership, and Leadership, tackles this critical question. We bring together leading scholars in party politics, AI ethics, and democracy studies to explore AI’s transformative influence on political strategy, grassroots mobilization, and decision-making processes. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, expert presentations, and hands-on scenario planning, we’ll investigate how AI impacts political parties using Katz and Mair’s (1993) three-level framework: the party in public office, the party on the ground, and the party central office. Despite the rapid growth of research on AI and democracy, few studies have focused on its impact on political parties key actors in representative systems. By addressing this gap, we aim to make a significant contribution to understanding the future of political organizations in the age of AI, inspiring further scholarship.
Past working groups
Our working group aims to bring together a variety of leading scholars from different disciplines and countries to study how industrial policy is actually done in Europe and beyond, and what the specific role of technology is therein. This promises not only to significantly advance the existing and rapidly growing literature on industrial policy and digital policy-making. It will also have practical relevance for the effectiveness and legitimacy of industrial and digital policy.
The discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily focussed on text-to-text generators such as chat GPT. Less attention is paid to generative visual communication, which is currently gaining in popularity: AI images can be generated effortlessly with tools such as Stable Diffusion and are already being used in many contexts without their origin being obvious to the viewer. These images have the potential to fundamentally change the production, use and reception of images. The planned working group aims to close this gap and examine the topic of AI-generated images in a multidisciplinary way. In five workshops (three face-to-face, two virtual), we will analyse the characteristics and challenges of generative images (object-centred perspective), the production and presentation contexts (communicator-centred perspective) and the reception and media competence of users (reception- and usage-oriented perspective). The results will be presented in scientific publications and at a specialist conference. In addition, we are drawing up guidelines on the ethical use of generative images and are endeavouring to perpetuate the collaboration and obtain further funding.
Since the 1990s, politicians, policymakers, scholars, technical experts and representatives of the private sector and civil society have been discussing and struggling over the role of the state in the […]
We are aiming to produce a joint publication in the format of a special issue in an international academic journal. Moreover, we also aim to publish a short article to the general public and the professional community of police organizations.
Our project makes a critical intervention in this debate by examining how four groups of actors – the tech and academic community, non-profit advocacy organisations, states, and corporations – have influenced how we conceptualise internet freedom and evaluating the real-world consequences of their ideas
At CAIS, we will be researching and analysing ethical issues surrounding internet search. To this end, we will draw on previous findings from the Open Search Foundation’s Ethics Expert Group as well as interim results from the EU project OpenWebSearch.EU.
Suchmaschinen sind aus unserem Alltag nicht mehr wegzudenken. Die Websuche wirft jedoch zahlreiche Probleme auf, darunter einen monopolisierten Markt, mangelnde Transparenz, fehlende Privatsphäre, ethische und geopolitische Risiken. Künstliche Intelligenz verstärkt diese. Die Informationsvielfalt als Eckpfeiler der Demokratie ist gefährdet.
Am CAIS werden wir ethische Fragen rund um die Internetsuche erforschen und vertiefen. Dazu stützen wir uns auf bisherige Ergebnisse der Fachgruppe Ethik der Open Search Foundation sowie auf Zwischenresultate des EU-Projekts OpenWebSearch.EU
This workgroup, drawing on the linguistic and cultural diversity of its members, will analyze media coverage of generative AI in three different countries and three different languages: in Italian in Italy, In French in Switzerland and in English in the United States.
This proposed working group will analyse how various features connect far-right and religious nationalist movements across multiple media, platforms, and countries.