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dr. D. Babushkina PhD (Dina)

Assistant Professor

About Me

I am an assistant professor in philosophy of technology & society, Section of Philosophy (BMS), University of Twente. I am also a research fellow at the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (Gravitation Program). I have a PhD in History of Philosophy (Dr. Phil; focus on Idealism and existentialism) and a PhD in Ethics (Dr. SocSc; focus on moral psychology and normative ethics). 

Research

My primary research interest is in philosophy of artificial intelligence and “smart” robotics. My approach combines ethics, epistemology, psychology, philosophical anthropology, and computer science. One of the core elements of my approach can be called "ethics-through-epistemology", a claim that for the solution of ethical problems with AI, we must understand how AI transforms information and how its outcomes relate to knowledge.

More specifically, I am looking into questions about:

  • the interaction between AI and humans, esp. AI as a player in interpersonal relationships; 
  • the ways in which personhood and agency change due to our interactions with AI and data-mining technologies (incl. digital twins, digital identity, hybridization of personhood and cognitive agency, esp. the ways in which AI is integrated into decision making processes);
  • the ways in which life experiences (e.g. interpersonal relationships, phenomenology of living environments) transform as a result of the integration of artificial agents as mediators of such experiences.

Domain-wise, I primarily focus on AI and robotics in healthcare & social care, psychotherapy (esp. patent’s perspective) and companionship, and AI for cities (esp. citizens’ perspective & lived experiences).

I am the coordinator of the UT's Ethics and Epistemology of AI Initiative (EthEpi of AI). Feel free to get in touch!

Publications

Recent
Babushkina, D. (2022). What does it mean for a robot to be respectful? Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 26(1), 1-30. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne2022523158
Babushkina, D. (2020). Respectfulness by Design. Abstract from 2nd Workshop on Implementing Machine Ethics 2020, Dublin, Ireland.
Babushkina, D. (2020). Towards Patient-oriented Transparency. In Tethics2020: Proceedings of the Conference on Technology Ethics (pp. 117-124)
Babushkina, D. (2020). Robots to Blame? In Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics (pp. 305-315). (Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications; Vol. 335). https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA200927
Votsis, A. , & Babushkina, D. (2020). Understanding settlement-landscape interaction with literary records and geoinformatics: The case of Homer’s Late Bronze Age Southeast Aegean. In EGU General Assembly 2020: Co-production and evolution in human-landscape interaction: from geoarchaeological records to geomorphological dynamics and human influence https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-13700

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Contact Details

Visiting Address

University of Twente
Drienerlolaan 5
7522 NB Enschede
The Netherlands

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Mailing Address

University of Twente
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands

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