Militaries increasingly utilise AI technologies (AIT) for decision support and combat operations. These developments point in the direction of a potential comprehensive integration of AIT into military decision-making processes. This makes it likely for such processes to be characterised by many situations of human-machine interaction, often described by militaries as human-machine teaming. Practices of human-machine interaction have the potential to profoundly alter the quality of human agency, understood as the ability to make choices and act, in warfare. Specifically, these practices shape forms of distributed agency in between humans and AIT. Current (Western) military thinking underestimates the comprehensive significance of human-AIT interaction patterns – and how these shape human decision-making spaces and the exercise of human agency.Such thinking takes human personnel and AIT as distinct, fundamentally complementary entities. In other words, human-AIT teaming allows militaries to benefit from the ‘best of both worlds’. But making decisions with AIT shapes and affects human decision-making spaces in both intentional and non-intentional ways. It follows that instances of human-AIT interaction can be associated with advantageous but also adverse consequences for the exercise of human agency. Distributed agency therefore needs to be recognised as raising foundational operational, ethical-normative, and legal challenges.About Ingvild BodeIngvild Bode is Professor of International Politics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). She is also Director of the Center for War Studies at SDU. Ingvild is the Principal Investigator of two large externally funded research projects: the AutoNorms project (funded by the European Research Council) investigating how practices related to autonomous weapon systems change international norms, and the HuMach project (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark) that examines how interacting with AI technologies changes the exercise of human agency in warfare. Ingvild is an expert member of the Global Commission on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (GC REAIM). Previously, Ingvild served as Chair of the IEEE Research Group on Issues of AI and Autonomy for Defense Systems. Ingvild’s research focuses on processes of normative and policy change, especially with regard to the use of force and AI governance. Her work has been published with the European Journal of International Relations, Ethics and Information Technology, Review of International Studies, Global Studies Quarterly, and other journals. Ingvild’s most recent book entitled Autonomous Weapons and International Norms (co-authored with Hendrik Huelss) was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

There is increasing evidence that most scientific research does not meet standards of reproducibility and transparency. Concurrently, there are many efforts to improve the reproducibility, transparency, and eventually the credibility and usefulness of scientific evidence. Peer review is a central mechanism for vetting, correcting, and improving science. However, it has met with a broadening range of challenges, as 7 million papers are published every year, publication systems are over-commercialized, and reviewers are overfatigued. Many scholars argue that research assessment in general, if done properly for individuals and institutions, can be a major tool for enhancing research design, conduct, and outcomes. A central quest is whether proper incentives are provided and reinforced. Many ideas are proposed for changing peer review and research assessment, but few of them have solid evidence.About John P.A. IoannidisJohn P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc was born in New York City and raised in Athens, Greece. He trained at Athens College, University of Athens (medicine and DSc in biopathology), Harvard and Tufts (internal medicine, infectious diseases), and then held positions at NIH, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Harvard, Imperial College, and University of Ioannina. He moved to Stanford in 2010 where he is Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Heath, and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science. He launched the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) in 2013. He has served as President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology and of the Association of American Physicians, as editorial board member of many leading journals and as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He has been elected to many honorific academies and has received 6 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards. He is the author of ten literary books, three of them shortlisted for best book of the year Anagnostis awards in Greece. His work aims to improve research methods and practices and to enhance approaches to integrating information and generating reliable evidence. VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

Twenty years past from the isolation of graphene. In this talk we will discuss some history connected to the graphene discovery. We will also consider how 2D materials, van der Waals heterostructures and metasurfaces inspired by graphene, enriched physics and technology. The talks main emphasis will be made on optics in flatland and plasmonics, a glimpse into a future of flatland will be provided.About Prof. A. N. GrigorenkoProf. A. N. Grigorenko got PhD from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1989 and worked as a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester from 2002. He is a specialist in plasmonics, nano-optics, magnetism and superconductors. By Google scholar, he got 37090 citations with h-index 51 and i10-index 104. His best works are on optics of graphene/2D materials and properties of artificial plasmonic crystals.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

The democratic triumphalism of the 1990s has given way to a sense that democracy is in crisis – whether because it’s been hijacked by woke metropolitan elites, or because it’s being assailed by populist masses. In this context it’s arguably unhelpful to proceed from the premise that the meaning of democracy had been established, but is now failing because of bad actors (which is not to say that there aren’t bad actors around). To free our imaginations to find new ways forward, we should start by recognising that the meanings of democracy have always been contested, that predominant meanings have changed over time (and varied over space), and that democratic projects have often run into difficulties and had to be rethought. In this lecture I will draw on the findings of a long-running historical research project, ‘Re-imagining democracy’, which looks at the circumstances in which the ancient concept of democracy was ‘re-imagined’ for modern circumstances, from the era of the American and French revolutions. The project spans Europe and both Americas, focussing on a century in which the fortunes of the word were especially changeable and varied. I will try to give a flavour of how and why its meanings and associations varied and changed.About Joanna Innes Joanna Innes is Professor (emeritus) of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She was educated in Britain and the United States, and first employed at Oxford in 1982. Her early research focussed on social policy-making in England, often in a larger European context, initially focussing especially on punishment and poverty. She is now working on the emergence of new topics on the British parliamentary agenda in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including health, education and working conditions. Her work focusses especially on policy-making processes, in a period in which the British government largely left the initiative to groups outside Parliament. The effect was that policy-making was fairly participatory, and the subject of public debate. Some of this work is collected in her volume Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Britain 1688-1800 (2009). For the past twenty years she has also collaborated with Mark Philp on an international project, Re-imagining Democracy (www.re-imaginingdemocracy.com ). This explores how the ancient concept of democracy was adapted to conceptualise modern problems and opportunities. The project has given rise to three collections of essays (2013, 2018, 2023 – details on the website).  A fourth and final volume, focussing on ‘central and northern Europe’ (including Nordic countries) is currently in train.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

In The Road to Freedom Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dissects America’s current economic system and the political ideology that created it, laying bare their twinned failure. “Free” and unfettered markets have only succeeded in delivering a series of crises: the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, and the crisis of inequality. While a small portion of the population has amassed considerable wealth, wages for most people have stagnated. Free and unfettered markets have exploited consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Such failures have fed populist movements that believe being free means abandoning any obligations citizens have to one another. As they grow in strength, these movements now pose a real threat to true economic and political freedom.The Road to Freedom breaks new ground, showing how economics―including recent advances in which Stiglitz has played such an important role―reframes how to think about freedom and the role of the state in a twenty-first century society. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, Stiglitz explains a deeper, more humane way to assess freedoms―one that considers with care what to do when one person’s freedom conflicts with another’s. We must reimagine our existing economic and legal systems and embrace forms of collective action, including regulation and investment, if we are to create an innovative society in which everyone can flourish.About Joseph E. StiglitzJoseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's research focuses on income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.