Directorate
PAIR Director − Prof. Vincent C. Müller
Vincent Müller is AvH Professor for Philosophy and Ethics of AI and Director of the Centre for Philosophy and AI Research (PAIR) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (6 post-docs, 6 pre-docs) – as well as Visiting Professor at TU Eindhoven, President of the European Society for Cognitive Systems, Chair of the Society for the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, and Chair of the euRobotics topics group on ‘ethical, legal and socio-economic issues’. Previously, he was Professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven (2019-22) and at Anatolia College/ACT in Thessaloniki (1998-2019), Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London (2018-22), University Academic Fellow at the University of Leeds (2016-22), James Martin Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2011-15) and Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton University (2005-6). Müller studied philosophy with cognitive science, linguistics and history at the universities of Marburg, Hamburg, London and Oxford.
Director of Research − PD Dr. Sascha Benjamin Fink
Before joining PAIR as Director of Research, Sascha Benjamin Fink was Juniorprofessor for Neurophilosophy at Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, where he still is a member of the Centre for Behavioral Brain Sciences. His work focuses on foundational issues of the empirical mind sciences as well as structural approaches to consciousness, transformative experiences, sensory engineering, and epistemic risks. Currently, he is an editor-in-chief of the diamond open-access journal “Philosophy and the Mind Sciences”, funded by the DFG, and is involved in four other projects as a PI, namely on psychedelics (PsychedELSI and PsyTrans), sensory engineering (SENSOR) and pain (COMPAIN). He is also an Affiliate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experiences and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
Assistant Director − Miriam Gorr
Miriam’s PhD project focuses on the question of whether we have moral obligations towards AI. Her argument is that in order for an AI system to be a proper object of our moral concern, the system must have certain kinds of interest. To explain what these interests are and how they might be identified, she draws systematic comparisons with animal ethics and cognition. Before joining PAIR, Miriam was a PhD student at the Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden.
Team Assistant
Senem Erhun (on site 9-13:00)
Research Assistant
Eleftheria Tsouika (on site 9-13:00)