This group consists of a team of scholars whose work focuses on designing tools used to model and interpret both descriptive and normative aspects of organizations and society. The Ethics group also works on modeling and understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The Ethics group's work is informed by a multidisciplinary approach that draws on insights from social and business sciences, computer and information science, artificial intelligence, logic, ethics, philosophy, and mathematics.
The group's research involves the development of theory, general techniques, and tools based on logical and mathematical methods to represent and reason about categorization systems. This is important work because categories and categorization provide the most basic cognitive underpinning to meaning-formation, evaluation, and decision-making. A major direction of the group's work is to use these tools to design novel and explainable learning algorithms, as well as to develop foundational methods for explainable AI. This helps ensure that the decision-making processes of AI systems are understandable and that the results they produce can be explained in human terms. Another important direction is to use these tools to model and describe social interaction, social processes, and organizations. These models do not only allow to describe such systems, but also to analyse and assess them through normative and ethical perspectives.
Informed by its research, the group is responsible for teaching the Ethics courses in the Bachelor programs for Business Administration (Bedrijfskunde), International Business Administration, Economics and Business Economics, and Econometrics and Operations Research.