Related papers: The Science Fiction Science Method
Autonomous space vehicles need adaptive control strategies that can accommodate unanticipated environmental conditions. The evaluation of new strategies can often be done only by actually trying them out in the real physical environment.…
Scenario planning may assist us in harnessing the benefits of nanotechnology and managing the associated risks for the good of the society. Scenario planning is a way to describe the present state of the world and develop several hypotheses…
National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…
Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight into human decision-making using tools that…
Climate change presents an existential threat to human societies and the Earth's ecosystems more generally. Mitigation strategies naturally require solving a wide range of challenging problems in science, engineering, and economics. In this…
The development of scientometric indicators and methods for evaluative purposes, requires a multitude of assumptions, conventions, limitations, and caveats. Given this, we cannot permit ambiguities in the key concepts forming the basis of…
How does the extent to which a model is open or closed impact the scientific inferences that can be drawn from research that involves it? In this paper, we analyze how restrictions on information about model construction and deployment…
Thought experiments are considered valuable tools in science, enabling the exploration of hypotheses and the examination of complex ideas in a conceptual, non-empirical framework. These thought experiments can be useful in design fiction…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Women are underrepresented in Computer Science disciplines at all levels, from undergraduate and graduate studies to participation and leadership in academia and industry. Increasing female representation in the field is a grand challenge…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
Computational social science research, particularly online studies, often involves exposing participants to the adverse phenomenon the researchers aim to study. Examples include presenting conspiracy theories in surveys, exposing systems to…
When discussing the future of work and in detail the concerns of workers within and beyond established workplace settings, technology-wise we act on rather new ground. Especially preserving a meaningful work environment gains new importance…
Forecasting techniques for assessing the power of future experiments to discriminate between theories or discover new laws of nature are of great interest in many areas of science. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian forecasting method…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
As technological innovation continues to shape our world at an accelerating pace, policy makers struggle to keep up with the unintended consequences of these new technologies. To address this policy-novelty gap, Responsible Research…
From smart sensors that infringe on our privacy to neural nets that portray realistic imposter deepfakes, our society increasingly bears the burden of negative, if unintended, consequences of computing innovations. As the experts in the…
Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…
This paper introduces two ongoing research projects which seek to apply computer modelling techniques in order to simulate human behaviour within organisations. Previous research in other disciplines has suggested that complex social…
Safe control methods are often intended to behave safely even in worst-case human uncertainties. However, humans may exploit such safety-first systems, which results in greater risk for everyone. Despite their significance, no prior work…