Annual meeting of the GEHBa in Ingolstadt

Everything revolved around ethics, artificial intelligence, and automated driving at the annual meeting of the Joint Ethics Committee of the Universities of Applied Sciences of Bavaria (Gemeinsame Ethikkommission der Hochschulen Bayerns, GEHBa) on April 13, 2023, held at Ingolstadt University of Technology (Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, THI). The GEHBa currently has 27 members from 15 universities and one Competence Center in the Free State of Bavaria.

On a guided tour of the THI campus and the facilities of the CARISSMA research and test center for vehicle safety, which hosts test tracks, a drop tower, driving simulators, and virtual reality, the GEHBa members gained insights into cutting-edge ongoing research. The tour also included a visit to the newly opened science gallery (Wissenschaftsgalerie) of the BMDV-funded research project SAVeNoW in the old town.

After a greeting by Prof. Dr. Walter Schober, President of THI and Chairman of Hochschule Bayern e.V., GEHBa Chairman Prof. Dr. Walter Swoboda led into the afternoon program with lectures on current hot topics in the context of ethics. In addition to a reflection on the "good misconduct" of humans by Prof. Georg Rainer Hofmann (Aschaffenburg University of Technology) and a presentation of a tool for the ethical evaluation of technology by Prof. Dr. Karsten Weber (Eastern Bavarian Technical University of Regensburg), Prof. Dr. Andreas Riener (THI), who played a major role in organizing the meeting, talked about ethically relevant aspects of automated driving. Finally, Prof. Dr. Matthias Uhl (also THI) gave a keynote lecture on the moral authority of ChatGPT, a modern chat bot with artificial intelligence.

In the future, the members of the GEHBa plan to hold an annual meeting in presence once a year at changing university locations in Bavaria to discuss ethics topics related to applied research. Since the foundation of the GEHBa in 2019/2020, the ethics committee members have met exclusively online via video conference and have evaluated more than one hundred ethics proposals on planned research projects with human subjects in thirty-two regular meetings. This way, the GEHBa with its broadly diversified expertise and independence, which also officially cooperates with the Joint Committee on the Handling of Security-Relevant Research of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, contributes an important part to the safeguarding of good scientific practice at Bavarian universities of applied sciences.