Project Coordinator

Prof. Philippe Goujon is a Doctor of Philosophy and Professor at the FUNDP. In 2004 he obtained the Habilitation à diriger des recherches (director of investigation) and was qualified as "Maître de Conférences" and Professor in Epistemology and History of Science. In 2009 he was nominated as a professor. He has authored numerous articles on artificial life, self-organization, thermodynamics, the complexity, biotechnology, genomics and also the connection between science, technology, education and culture. His research now concerns the epistemology of complexity as well as the interaction between science, technology and culture, the cultural impact of informatics, the philosophy of informatics, the epistemology of computing and the governance and ethical issues of the information society. He chaired various international conferences concerning governance and ethics. He is member of the Working group Working group (WG) 9.2 of IFIP association (The International Federation for Information Processing) and member of the (Special interest group) SIG 9.2.2 of IFIP. He was partner in the Miauce European project (Multi-modal interactions analysis and exploration of users within a controlled environment (http://www.miauce.org/). Actually he is partner in two European project (ETICA Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications: http://moriarty.tech.dmu.ac.uk:8080/ and EGAIS the ethical governance of emerging technologies: http://www.egais-project.eu/), where he is responsible of one work package and has published books concerning the new governance of the information society and more generally has directed international conference and seminar on the problem of governance ethic and democracy.

Dr. Robert Gianni holds a PhD in Political and Theoretical Philosophy from SUM/Scuola Normale Superiore, under the supervision of Prof. R. Esposito and Prof. G. Marramao. He spent part of his research period at Goethe Universität with Dr. Prof. Axel Honneth. 

His research has been focusing on Critical Theory and different approaches to the problem of justice with a special attention to its social repercussions. He has published and edited works on the notion of RRI with its link to ethics and social justice.

The fundamental aims of the Laboratory for Ethical Governance of Information Technology (LEGIT) are to:

• investigate and determine the conditions and applications of the relationship between ethics, governance, rationality, and technological research and development;
• focus specifically on information and computing technologies research; and
• provide a framework for improved governance mechanisms that will identify and address potential ethical issues arising from new and emerging technologies in the early stages of development.

The Laboratory seeks to understand the activities through which society attempts to act and to regulate itself that are based on ethical norms that have been judged as legitimate and valid in specific relation to ICT.

The operational base for this research is an important network of international laboratory and researcher and an international network built around different research projects. These are, in particular, two current European projects on the themes of scientific and technological development, ethics, rationality, and governance. The first is ETICA: Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications: http://www.etica-project.eu/ and the second is EGAIS: Ethical GovernAnce of emerging technologIeS: http://www.egais-project.eu/. The originality of LEGIT’s research is to develop a new level of consideration regarding the ethical analysis of technological research and development. Its main aim is to overcome the limitations of the current ethical approaches in relation to technology.