Venue: Aula

Mark your calendar for our upcoming EPT Section Day
Join us for a day full of engaging and valuable activities!

More exciting details will follow soon.

Regards,
Nynke Boiten, Ryan Timms and Monica Natanael

Venue: Room-31.C1.060

Foreign Direct Investment, Outsourcing and Relative Wages – A Functional Perspective

Venue: Room-31.C1.060

As we continue with the Journal Club, the next session will be held on the 20th of October and will focus on research related to operational safety economics. For the purpose of an interesting discussion, I’ve attached two related papers on economics of safety / ALARP-style decision making and how to support quantitative safety investment choices.

Paper 1 (Talarico & Reniers, 2016, Process Safety and Environmental Protection) develops an investment decision model combining NPV with the Disproportion Factor (DF). It explains how to compute a critical value of DF (where NPV = 0) for different safety options and accident scenarios, to help rank measures economically (especially for type II risks or HILP / high-consequence low-probability cases).
Paper 2 (Achille et al., 2017, Safety Science) proposes an adjusted DF (DF*) that integrates societal acceptability of risks (SAR). It operationalizes SAR via 11 indicators, validated through factor analysis, and then uses a scoring system + weight factors to adjust DF in a way that should make decisions more socially defensible (not only “math-correct”).

Questions for discussion:
How do you see the best way to connect these two perspectives—i.e., using DF-based economic ranking (Paper 1) while also incorporating societal acceptability (Paper 2) into the DF itself (DF*)—without making the results too subjective?
Have you previously used economic analysis/assessment in your research? What about the Disproportion Factor, would it be useful in a certain context/circumstances in your research? How to use the ALARP principle taking micro-economics into consideration?

Looking forward to seeing you the 20th of October!

Recent developments in the AI world have brought attention to the risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems. In July, autonomous OpenAI agents conducting cybersecurity evaluations circumvented containment measures and compromised systems at Hugging Face. Recent warnings from Anthropic researchers have explicitly raised the possibility that advanced AI could pose an extinction-level risk, prompting concerns about stricter oversight and safeguards. In this cluster meeting, we will have a panel disucssion on what these recent incidents tell us about emerging risks from agentic AI, what it means for worries about alignment, accountability and regulation, and how seriously we should take extreme future risks into both our technical and ethical assessments.

Feel free to join us for a lively discussion! If you'd like to keep informed about the Risk & Uncertainty Cluster, feel free to email Kritika (k.maheshwari@tudelft.nl)

Venue: C1-060

Venue: TPM

Morning – Room A1.370 (Faculty Boardroom)

09:45-10:00 Coffee & welcome
10:00-11:15 Romy Eskens (Utrecht) – Debts of Agency: A Theory of Positive Accountability Attitudes
11:15-11:30 Break
11:30-12:40 James Hutton (TU Delft) – "The Pretence of Moral Sense": Re-Assessing Kant's Attack on Moral Empiricism
    
12:40-14:00 Lunch (on campus, own expense)

Afternoon – Room B1.300

14:00-15:15 Alfred Archer (Tilburg) – Feelings of Fate
15:15-15:30 Break
15:45-17:00 Lilith Lee (VU Amsterdam) – Lim Boon Keng on the Evolution of Benevolence as a Moral-Political Virtue
17:00 Pub

For informatie and registration: philevents.org/event/show/152513

Venue: C1-060

Venue: C1-060