Abstract Submission Guidelines

1. The extended abstract must be written in English.

2. The extended abstract must be the original ideas and work of the author(s).

3. The word limit is 1500 words. Important: if you upload the extended abstract as a PDF, please remove any identifiable information (e.g., your name, affiliation). The text (PDF) should be max. 1500 words, excluding references.

4. Extended abstracts can be submitted either to a specialised, thematic track, or to the open track. For the list and a description of the tracks, see below.

5. The extended abstract must be uploaded via this URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ethicomp2027

6. The submission deadline is 19 October 23:59 CET. Please note that all extended abstracts will be peer-reviewed. If your abstract is accepted for the conference, at least one author must register for the conference and attend in-person to present the work (a presentation of max. 20 minutes, followed by a short Q&A). 

The submissions are organised into the following specialised tracks (see below for a longer description):

• Minds, Algorithms, and Meaning: Rethinking Education in the Age of AI

• AI Refusal in Education

• Digital Care and the Human(e) Factor: Ethics of Emerging Technologies in Health, Welfare, and Organisations

• Ethics, Law, and Governance of Dual-Use Technologies

• Double Edged Sword: Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Cross Paths

• Re-imagining Ethical, Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Futures

• The Politics and Practice of Refusal: Technology, History, and Alternative Futures

• The Ethics of Hype and the Hype of Ethics

• Lost in Translation? Methodological Tensions in AI Research

• Open Track

Tracks

Minds, Algorithms, and Meaning: Rethinking Education in the Age of AI

This track explores how AI is reshaping teaching, learning, and access to knowledge, with a deliberate focus on the ethical and social stakes: sense, bias, and fairness in educational algorithms, data privacy for students, the changing role of teachers, the future of assessment in a generative-AI world, and the widening or narrowing of opportunity gaps.

Track chair: Mario Arias-Oliva, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

AI Refusal in Education

As AI tools rapidly expand in school and higher education, forms of resistance and refusal are also emerging inside and outside academia. Educators, researchers, students, and activists raise concerns about the pedagogical, ethical, political, and social implications of AI tools in education. These critiques address issues such as learning theory, educational quality, dependency, surveillance, and structural power imbalances. At the same time, refusal has become increasingly difficult to defend. Schools and universities face strong pressure to adopt AI in order to remain competitive, innovative, and future-oriented. Institutions want students to develop competencies for the "era of AI".      

Moreover, many potentially harmful effects of AI in education may only become visible in the long term and are therefore difficult to prove empirically today. For this reason, debates about AI refusal may require stronger conceptual, ethical, and pedagogical arguments.      

This track invites critical and interdisciplinary contributions that explore the possibilities, limits, and implications of resisting AI adoption in educational contexts. Theoretical, empirical, and practice-based perspectives on AI refusal in education are warmly welcomed!

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Conceptualizations of AI refusal and related concepts (e.g. non-use, disengagement)

• Pedagogical justifications for (ref)using AI in school or higher education

• The ethics and politics of AI refusal in education

• Educational dependency on and surveillance through commercial AI platforms

• Institutional, political, and economic drivers of AI adoption in education

• Individual and collective forms of resisting AI adoption

• Critical perspectives on educational frameworks for AI (e.g. AI literacy, AI competence)

• Historical perspectives on technology, education, and refusal

• Empirical studies of AI refusal in schools and higher education

• Methodological challenges in studying the long-term impacts of AI in education

Track chair: Sercan Sever, University of Tuebingen, Germany

Digital Care and the Human(e) Factor: Ethics of Emerging Technologies in Health, Welfare, and Organisations

Digital technologies are increasingly introduced into care-related contexts, including health care, long-term care, disability support, social care, family life, education, and organisational practice. These technologies include AI-based decision support, digital health platforms, welfare technologies, care robots, social robots, XR applications, sensors, eye-tracking systems, data infrastructures, brain-computer interfaces, brain-machine interfaces, and other forms of neurotechnology.

This track invites interdisciplinary contributions that examine the ethical, social, political, and philosophical implications of such technologies. Rather than treating care merely as an application domain for technology, the track approaches care as a critical site where questions of agency, vulnerability, dependency, autonomy, responsibility, professional judgement, trust, dignity, privacy, surveillance, and organisational accountability become especially visible.

The track welcomes conceptual, empirical, comparative, design-oriented, policy-oriented, practice-based, and interdisciplinary contributions. It aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working in computer ethics, information ethics, philosophy of technology, STS, HCI, health and care studies, disability studies, management and organisation studies, law, public policy, sociology, anthropology, education, and related fields.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to:

• Digital care, digital health, welfare technologies, and assistive technologies

• AI, data infrastructures, and platformisation in health, welfare, and care services

• Brain-computer interfaces, brain-machine interfaces, and neurotechnology in care, rehabilitation, disability support, and work

• Care robots, social robots, XR, sensors, eye-tracking, and monitoring technologies

• Agency, autonomy, vulnerability, dependency, dignity, and participation in digitally mediated care

• Privacy, surveillance, transparency, trust, and data access in care-related digital systems

• Organisational responsibility, professional judgement, staff training, procurement, and implementation

• Management, leadership, accountability, and digital transformation in care organisations

• Comparative, cross-cultural, and policy-oriented studies of digital care

• Ethical design, impact assessment, governance, and evaluation of emerging care technologies

• Digital technologies in family life, child development, ageing, disability, and community care

• Tensions between efficiency, quality of care, human contact, and institutional responsibility

Track chair: Ryoko Asai, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany / Meiji University, Japan

Track co-chairs: Kiyoshi Murata, Meiji University, Japan; Mineko Wada, Hiroshima University, Japan; Tatsuya Yamazaki; University of Toyama, Japan

Ethics, Law, and Governance of Dual-Use Technologies

Current geopolitical tensions highlight how emerging technologies increasingly blur the boundaries between civilian, scientific and military applications. Artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, quantum computing, cybersecurity tools and advanced data infrastructures are often characterised by a dual-use nature, meaning that technologies designed for beneficial and innovative purposes may also be repurposed for surveillance, coercion, warfare, or other military uses. Against this backdrop, the ethical and legal governance of dual-use technologies has become a pressing challenge for policymakers, researchers, industry actors, and civil society. Particular attention should be devoted to the implications of dual-use technologies for academic freedom and international research collaboration, especially in contexts involving AI for scientific research, biomedical innovation, healthcare and security-related applications. Questions also emerge regarding responsibility and accountability in research governance, export controls, risk assessment, human rights protection and the tensions between openness and security in scientific knowledge production. The track welcomes interdisciplinary submissions addressing the ethical, legal, political, philosophical, and societal dimensions of dual-use technologies. Contributions may explore issues related to AI in science, medicine and healthcare, autonomous systems, research security, digital infrastructures, and the governance of emerging technologies from national, regional, and global perspectives.

Track chair: Ludovica Paseri, University of Turin, Italy

Double Edged Sword: Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Cross Paths

This track invites papers that reflect on the technical, privacy and ethical implications of cybersecurity practices with the evolving new trends such as AI. As both cybersecurity and AI play an important role in determining the safety of global digital infrastructure, it warrants attention from businesses, governments, academia and alike to collaborate to a cross-disciplinary dialogue to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technological advancements and ethical implications to govern cybersecurity practices responsibly. There is no doubt that AI can assist in solving the problem that involves millions of data with various tools and techniques. At the same time, recent breaches bring the discussion of the double edged sword that the human and ethical aspect should not be ignored when developing best practices in minimizing, managing and mitigating risks involved with such technologies. For example, the "Shadow AI" Trap where employees could paste corporate source code, financials, or protected client data into unauthorized, public generative AI tools. Consequently, creating a massive data leak, leading to a spike in insider threat breaches which cost organizations an average of millions of Dollars. We invite papers to reflect and have a meaningful discussion on various aspects linked with the theme of this track.

Track chairs: Shalini Kesar, Southern Utah University, USA; Sabina Szymoniak, Czestochowa University of Technology, Poland

Re-imagining Ethical, Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Futures

Technology has already transformed all aspects of life in expected and unexpected ways. Every day, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), are rewriting the rules of what’s possible, reshaping our norms and revolutionising the way we interact with humans and technology, the way that we live and behave, and how we envision the future of our society.

But, instead of passively adapting to emerging digital futures, we have the opportunity to reimagine them. This requires addressing “how can technological innovation advance both human well-being and environmental sustainability?” Despite the long debate on the innovative aspects of technology targeting the short-term period, further research is needed to understand the conditions under which AI technologies shape our present and future societies in responsible and equitable ways. Thus, deeper understanding of the ethical challenges, associated with cognitive apathy, inequality, digital divide, surveillance, environmental costs, disinformation, exclusion, bias, and the concentration of technological power, is needed, while collectively exploring alternative pathways for ethical digital futures that are aligned with our values.

Addressing these issues requires innovative exploration of alternative, responsible pathways for digital transformation and emerging digital futures. To this end, this track invites interdisciplinary research studies that critically explore this topic, and introduce innovative and practical frameworks, case studies, and policy perspectives laying the groundwork for reimagining ethical digital futures for all. Contributions may concern the following thematic areas:

• Responsible innovation and ethical digital futures: Exploring innovative, ethical and practical frameworks for the responsible design and development of AI technologies.

• Human-centered digital futures: Exploring digital futures that empower humans and prioritise knowledge, accessibility for all, user agency, and positive long-term societal impact.

• Sustainable digital futures: Exploring sustainability-driven frameworks that support environmental sustainability and responsible use of resources.

• Policy, governance, and digital rights: Exploring policy, governance, and regulatory approaches that foster transparency, accountability, privacy, fairness, and democratic participation in digital societies.

• Alternative, inclusive digital futures: Envisioning pluralistic, participatory, and culturally inclusive approaches to digital transformation that reflect diverse societal values and perspectives.

Track chairs: Xenia Ziouvelou, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR Demokritos, Greece; Konstantina Giouvanopoulou, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR Demokritos, Greece

The Politics and Practice of Refusal: Technology, History, and Alternative Futures

Refusal is not merely negation. To refuse a technology (its terms, its logics, its implicit visions of the future) is simultaneously to assert that another way of being in the world is possible and worth fighting for. The 'no' carries within it a 'yes'.      

This track takes refusal seriously as a political, ethical, and creative act across the full breadth of technological history and contemporary life. We deliberately resist the gravitational pull of AI as the default horizon of technology discourse, and invite contributions that draw on the long and varied history of technological refusal. From Luddism and labour struggles against mechanisation, to rejections of nuclear infrastructure, to feminist and postcolonial refusals of medical and surveillance technologies, to indigenous communities asserting sovereignty over data and extractive technological systems. Refusal has always been with us; what changes are its targets, its actors, its costs, and its consequences.      

Relevant themes include: historical case studies of technological refusal; the philosophy of 'no' and its relationship to critique and prefigurative politics; refusal as method in design and activism; infrastructural lock-in and technological determinism; and the imagination of genuinely alternative futures.

Track chairs: Dani Shanley, Maastricht University & Michael Kibedi, Independent Design Researcher

The Ethics of Hype and the Hype of Ethics

Hype is no longer a peripheral element of technoscientific discourse; it is a central force shaping how futures are imagined, circulated, and enacted within innovation cultures. Hype composes and directs attention, markets, politics, emotion, imagination, matter, knowledge, time, and space. From artificial intelligence to blockchain, digital twins to robotics, cycles of inflated expectations and disillusionment have profound ethical consequences. Hype acts as a mobilizing, exclusionary, and performative phenomenon, shaping what futures are considered possible and fundable, often narrowing alternatives while amplifying dominant narratives.      Yet hype does not only shape technological futures, it shapes ethical ones too.

The rise of "AI ethics" as a field, brand, and institutional practice is itself a hype phenomenon, one that risks flattening genuinely contested moral terrain into a set of manageable, palatable tropes. Dominant ethical frameworks (e.g. fairness, transparency, accountability) are amplified and circulated in ways that lend legitimacy to existing power structures, while alternative, situated, non-Western, and more radically critical ethical traditions are marginalised or rendered invisible.   

This track invites contributions that examine hype as an ethical problem at the intersection of technology, society, and responsibility. We welcome empirical, philosophical, and design-led perspectives exploring how hype is produced, sustained, and/or resisted. At the same time, we are equally interested in contributions that interrogate how certain ethical narratives achieve dominance within computing and AI discourse, and what is lost (and for whom) when the conversation about ethics is already decided before it begins.   

Track chairs: Wenzel Mehnert, Austrian Institute of Technology & Vassilis Galanos, University of Stirling (on behalf of Hype Studies: https://hypestudies.org/about)

Lost in Translation? Methodological Tensions in AI Research

Research on AI takes place across disciplinary, institutional, and sectoral boundaries, bringing together data scientists, social scientists, ethicists, clinicians, designers, policymakers, and other stakeholders. These collaborations involve diverse and often diverging methodological approaches, epistemic commitments, and understandings of evidence and validity.      

While interdisciplinarity is widely framed as central to AI research, less attention is paid to what happens when different methods and ways of knowing meet in practice. Methods are not neutral tools in these encounters; they shape what becomes visible or measurable, how expertise is recognized, which questions can be asked, and how relations among stakeholders are structured.     

This track invites contributions that examine methodological practices and tensions in AI research.      

We are interested in how methods structure engagement among researchers, stakeholders, disciplines, institutions and sectors, and how they shape what counts as valid knowledge, including how research is translated, interpreted, and taken up in societal contexts. We especially welcome empirical and case-based contributions that engage with how methodological practices configure AI as an object of study. More broadly, we invite reflection on how methodological choices delimit what can be known about AI, and how they shape the visibility, intelligibility, and governance of AI in practice.

Track chairs: Hannah Piehl, Maastricht University; Ricky Janssen, Maastricht University; Tricia Griffin, Maastricht University

Open Track

The conference welcomes submissions that fall outside the scope of the aforementioned thematic tracks. This open track facilitates an inductive approach to the conference programme. Following the peer-review process, the programme and organising committees will structure the submissions to this track into more themes.

Key Dates

September 1, 2026: Abstract submission opens via EasyChair, see https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ethicomp2027

October 19, 2026 (23:59 CET): Abstract submission deadline (via EasyChair)

December 2026: notification accept/accept with changes/reject

December 2026: Registration opens