After three years of living and working in the Netherlands, I have often reflected on the differences between the Dutch and their southern neighbors. Student loans that have to be repaid are difficult to comprehend for a number of reasons. Young Dutch people are worse off than their Flemish...
By mid-March, teachers all over the world were faced with a tough challenge: a rapid transition to online education would have to be made. This prompted hilarious commentaries, such as this adaptation of Gloria Gaynor’s biggest hit, I Will Survive, Coronavirus version for teachers going...
Katherine Johnson died on the 24th of February at the age of almost 102. Johnson was a brilliant mathematician. Her work at NASA made an undeniably important contribution to American space flight. Yet she was also a woman. Moreover, an African-African woman, which kept her a hidden figure for far...
What might machines capable of moral behaviour effectively mean in practice? The Swedish fiction series Real Humans presents an interesting spin on this question. ‘Hubots’ – a contraction of ‘human’ and ‘robot’ – live together with human beings. They...
In the calm period after Christmas I wanted to quietly catch up on my backlog of unanswered emails that had accumulated during a busy first semester. However, the servers at my university had been hacked since Monday evening December 23rd. This gave me peace of mind on one hand. The cause of this...
Computers are good at abstract thinking; we are all too keen to delegate complex calculations to them in order to free ourselves from that chore. There is something threatening about the intelligence of machines too. Robots and synthetic or artificial intelligence (AI) force us to question our...
Research on artificial intelligence (AI) started in the years after the Second World War. John McCarthy, an American mathematician at Dartmouth College, coined the term in 1955 while he was working on a proposal for a summer school that he was seeking funding for. A group of AI pioneers met at...
Tomorrow is good: never say that ethics is just a trend
It was actually launched in the summer of 2016: the car for women. The SEAT Mii by Cosmopolitan was the result of a collaboration between the SEAT design team and the editors and readers of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan. The car was marketed as “exclusive” and aimed at the...
At the end of the 19th century, weight scales in France were advertised with the message that those who weigh themselves, know themselves well; and those who know themselves, they live well. Many decades later, Jawbone used the slogan ‘Know Yourself Live Better’ as a way to convince...
“Hans has been keeping a diary for more than thirty years and finds comfort in it, and also takes pleasure in it. The other day he found his diary from ’47, read it and, despite the idea for a story or even a novel, it made him very sad. There were things in that past that he would...
“We know where each student is anytime – which is virtually all the time – their mobile devices are connected to our WIFI network. When they enter their dorm, or dining court, or recreational facility, they swipe in, and a machine captures the time and place.” At Purdue University, every student...
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Podcast: TU Eindhoven researchers discuss how to overcome the trials and tribulations of working from home.