IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015 - 31

GUEST EDITORIAL

Keith Miller

Joe Herkert

Special Issue
on Ethics 2014/
ISTAS 2014

n May 23-24, 2014,
the IEEE held its
first International
Symposium on Ethics in Engineering,
Science, and Technology (ETHICS
2014). The 2014 SSIT International Symposium on Technology and
Society (ISTAS'14) was held in conjunction with ETHICS 2014 and we
were honored to serve as Co-Program Chairs of the joint conference.
Many IEEE societies (especially SSIT)
have previously held conferences
that focused on ethics, and other
societies' meetings have had tracks
or particular sessions on ethics. But
the breadth of the 2014 meeting
in Chicago was, as far as we know,
unprecedented for an IEEE-wide
meeting dedicated to ethics.
The papers submitted and the
papers accepted for this symposium
covered a wide spectrum of issues,
appropriate for a meeting that adopted the slogan "Ethics and..." for its
tracks. As part of the symposium,
two papers were selected for first and
second place in a "Best Paper" category. Three other papers, from students, were awarded first and second
place, and an honorable mention in
a separate competition. We invited
the authors of these five prize-winning papers to submit a version of
their work for this special issue. The

resulting papers were reviewed and
revised, and appear here.
Each of the resulting five papers
has a distinctive perspective on the
interaction of technology and society.
Two of the papers (one by Tamara
Bonaci, Ryan Calo, and Howard Jay
Chizeck; and one by Andrew Koivuniemi) take as their starting point technologies that interact with the brain. But
these two papers go in quite different
directions in exploring what this kind of
human/machine collaboration means
now and will mean in our future.
Jason Millar's paper looks at
another medical application (this
one "kick starts" the heart), and
makes a case for designating some
technologies as moral proxies for
medical decision-making. David
Dittrich, Katherine Carpenter, and
Manish Karir examine some thorny
issues resulting from a seemingly
benign bit of hacking that resulted in the anonymous Menlo Report
about Internet vulnerabilities.
One of the papers, by Valorie
Troesch, focuses on ethics, engineering,

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2425964
Date of publication: 19 June 2015

june 2015

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

and education. This paper argues for
instructors to take a more wholistic,
phenomenological approach when
teaching engineering ethics.
We hope that Technology and
Society Magazine readers will find
these papers intriguing. Our thanks
go to these authors, our reviewers,
the symposium paper judges, and all
the authors who submitted their work
to ETHICS 2014. We also encourage T&S readers to consider becoming involved in the next IEEE Ethics
conference (ETHICS 2016), which is
scheduled for March 18-20, 2016, in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Author Information
Keith Miller is Orthwein Endowed
Professor of Lifelong Learning in the
Sciences at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.
Email: millerkei@umsl.edu
Joe Herkert is a Visiting Scholar
at the Genetic Engineering & Society Center, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. Email: jherkert@
ncsu.edu.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015