Technology, Culture, and Virtue

Walter J. Scheirer is Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Scheirer’s research is primarily focused around the problem of recognition, including the representations and algorithms supporting solutions to it. He is particularly interested in features and learning-based methods that apply to both vision and language, thus breaking away from the persistent compartmentalization of recognition tasks. This has led to some interesting, and often unconventional approaches that can be applied to a broad set of areas including computer vision, machine learning, human biometrics, and the digital humanities. Specifically, his work is looking at open set recognition, extreme value theory models for visual recognition, biologically inspired learning algorithms, and stylometry.

Megan Levis is an assistant professor of the practice with the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns and College of Engineering. She recently completed her postdoctoral fellowship with Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Levis has a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests relate to questions concerning how technology shapes the cultural understanding of what it means to be human, and how technology can be designed to encourage virtue and the common good. She is also working to bring more character formation into the engineering curriculum at the University. Dr. Levis currently teaches tech ethics courses and first-year engineering courses.

Jeffrey P. Bishop is the Tenet Endowed Chair in Health Care Ethics, professor of philosophy and professor of theology at Saint Louis University. He holds an MD from the University of Texas and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Dallas. Bishop’s scholarly work is focused on the historical, political, and philosophical conditions that underpin contemporary medical and scientific practices and theories. He has written on diverse topics from transhumanism and enhancement technologies to clinical ethics consultation and medical humanities. Dr. Bishop is the author of The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying and is currently working on a second book with colleagues M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew Michel tentatively titled, Chasing After Virtue: Neuroscience, Economics, and the Biopolitics of Morality.