Call For Papers

CEPE 2019: 28–30 May, 2019, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

CEPE (Computer Ethics—Philosophical Enquiry) is a leading international conference and has played a significant role in defining the field since its first event in 1997. CEPE is held biennially, and is organized by INSEIT (the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology), and is organized for 2019 in collaboration with The Ionian University Research Team, IHRC (Information: History, Regulation and Culture). For CEPE 2019, the conference theme will be Risk and Cybersecurity. We encourage submissions on this theme, but welcome submissions on any topic related to ethics and computers.

Risk and Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is of pressing and ever-expanding importance to governments, organizations, and individuals as ever more of our lives becomes digitally rendered, analyzed, manipulated, and stored. Even as cybersecurity issues present threats to us both individually and collectively, cybersecuritization—the political action of consolidating power and control through rhetorics of “cybersecurity”—threatens people and peoples in different ways.

Risk is central to computer ethics in numerous other ways as well. Risk abounds online as we figure out how to negotiate and protect identities that are increasingly visible across many parts of our lives, to persons but to companies and algorithms as well. Risk has always been central to engineering ethics, and computer ethics continues to negotiate shifting boundaries of the morality of whistleblowing along with changes in the economic, social, legal, and human costs of a hacked database. These issues are complicated further by innovations in robotics and the internet of things, which spread risk across what once was an online/offline boundary and into the smallest cracks of our lives, from military and domestic robots, to smart cities and smart homes, and to the digital assistants and baby monitors in our kitchens and bedrooms.

We welcome submissions on any topic in computer ethics, but, in keeping with the conference theme, specifically encourage submissions on:

  • Ethics for cybersecurity professionals
  • Just war theory and cyberconflict
  • AI and risk
  • Information warfare
  • “Fake news,” deepfakes, and the information apocalypse
  • Risks to democracy and democratic processes
  • Privacy and users’ rights
  • Algorithmic bias and algorithmic ethics
  • Information and data ethics
  • Risk online
  • Cyberharassment
  • Race, gender, sexuality and risk in digital environments
  • Risk to health and health care
  • Online radicalization
  • Group identity and mobilization in digital environments
  • Self-driving vehicles
  • Ethics of hacking, and of hacking back
  • Cyberrisk and cybersecuritization in
    • smart cities and smart homes,
    • the internet of things
    • military robots, heathcare robots, domestic robots, sex robots, and other robots
  • and other topics related to risk, cybersecurity, securitization, internet studies, and the internet of things.

Keynote speakers will include Deborah G. Johnson (University of Virginia) and Anna Lauren Hoffmann (University of Washington).

Submissions will be accepted through EasyChair, here. We request English-language extended abstracts of 500–800 words, not including references,  prepared for double-blind review. Multiple submissions from a single author are welcome, but acceptance of multiple papers by the same author will be weighed against available program space. Publication in conference proceedings will be offered after the conference—for eligibility, full papers should be no more than 8000 words, and should not be previously published. Journal special issues will also be organized; participating journals will contact potential contributors separately. Enquiries may be directed to cepe2019 [at] easychair [dot] org.

Timeline:

Abstracts due: 22 October 2018—Extended to November 19th
Notice of acceptance/rejection: Early March, 2019
Conference: May 28–30, 2019