Juan Manuel Durán and Martin Sand awarded Fellowships at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study

Juan Manuel Durán and Martin Sand have been selected for a stay at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) in Amsterdam.

The NIAS Fellowship allows Juan Manuel Durán (project coordinator) and Martin Sand to work with three international scholars in a theme group on “Accountability in medical autonomous expert systems: ethical and epistemological challenges for explainable AI” for a period of three months in the upcoming fall. 

As the project coordinator, Durán will be focusing on the structure of scientific explanations for medical AI systems during the Fellowship. This encompasses issues stemming from epistemology, like the nature of opacity and transparency, and ethics, like the patient’s values and the implications for medical practice.

Sand will investigate the nature and justifiability of certain skills to enable doctors to responsibly interact with AI systems. This is motivated as the deployment of new skills to sufficiently understand or explain AI systems might be a necessary condition to maintain accountability in those systems.

Durán and Sand will become part of a carefully selected community of about sixty scholars, artists and writers. Our colleagues were selected by an external review process on the basis of the quality and innovative value of the research proposal. The success rate of NIAS fellowships is about ten percent.

About NIAS-KNAW

NIAS - one of the institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) –provides a physical and intellectual space for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences that is driven by curiosity and cross-discipline collaboration. It offers temporary fellowships to international and Dutch scholars. NIAS is located in Amsterdam.