Charles Max

A Model for Regulating of Ethical Preferences in Machine Ethics

Relying upon machine intelligence with reductions in the supervision of human beings, requires us to be able to count on a certain level of ethical behavior from it. Formalizing ethical theories is one of the plausible ways to add ethical dimensions to machines. Rule-based and consequence-based ethical theories are proper candidates for Machine Ethics. It is debatable that methodologies for each ethical theory separately might result in an action that is not always justifiable by human values. This inspires us to combine the reasoning procedure of two ethical theories, deontology and utilitarianism, in a utilitarian-based deontic logic which is an extension of STIT (Seeing To It That) logic. We keep the knowledge domain regarding the methodology in a knowledge base system called IDP. IDP supports inferences to examine and evaluate the process of ethical decision making in our formalization. To validate our proposed methodology we perform a Case Study for some real scenarios in the domain of robotics and automatous agents.

“And? Did We Do Nice Things?” Children Documenting Their Emerging Inquiries in Early Science Learning

This study investigates inquiry-based science activities in elementary school and examines ways in which science emerges from young students’ interactions. Regarding the context-sensitive organization of children’s talk around and about collaborative inquiry processes, the research foregrounds the quality of the learners’ semiotic resources they rely on as they “do” science within multi-modal interactions. It stresses the spontaneous ways they describe, explain, interconnect and reason about science phenomena and, more generally, how they talk their joint experiences into being. Particular attention is paid to possibilities for including students’ insights about their inquiry and learning processes in the analysis. The study explores to what extent learners manage to document ‘doing science’ with handheld cameras and how this can open a dialogue between students and teachers.

Tracing Science in the Early Childhood Classroom: The Historicity of Multi-resourced Discourse Practices in Multilingual Interaction

This chapter presents research conducted in early childhood classrooms in Luxembourg, a European country with a complex multilingual situation. A multi-layered corpus of classroom interactions, consisting of photos, video and audio recordings, was collected over a period of 12 months and then partially transcribed and annotated. Drawing from this corpus, this study sheds light on discourse practices of 4–8-year-old children and examines the co-construction of the children’s growing understandings of science in open collaborative inquiries. Arguing from a context-sensitive perspective, our research shows the learning of science as an interactional achievement in situ.