Faculty/department Technology, Policy and Management
Level Master degree
Maximum employment 38 hours per week (1 FTE)
Duration of contract 4 years
Salary scale €2,174 to €2,779 per month gross
Technology, Policy and Management
The Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management contributes to sustainable solutions for technical challenges in society by combining the insights from engineering with the humanities and the social sciences.
The Department of Values, Technology and Innovation (VTI) is one of three departments in the TPM Faculty. It uniquely comprises philosophers, economists and risk scholars. It studies how to develop and diffuse responsible technological innovations that reflect deeply held social and moral values.
The Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section is one of three sections within the VTI Department. The section plays a central role worldwide in research on ethics and philosophy of technology. The group's research covers a broad spectrum, ranging from applied research in collaboration with engineering scholars, experimental and empirical ethics in collaboration with social scientists, and foundational research in meta-ethics, risk theory, ontology and philosophy of science and design, and in applied logic. The ethics research programme focuses specifically on risk ethics, RI and VSD.
Job description
Professor Seumas Miller has recently secured a European Research Council Advanced Grant (€ 2.5 million) to undertake research on Global Terrorism and Collective Moral Responsibility: Redesigning Military, Police and Intelligence Institutions in Liberal Democracies. The research team will be located at TU Delft’s campus in The Hague, the Netherlands, and will comprise: Professor Miller (Principal Investigator), one senior research fellow, one post-doctoral fellow, a research assistant and two PhD students: one in computer science, ethics and security.
Contemporary liberal democracies must collaborate with one another to face the common problem of international terrorism. How should counter-terrorist institutional arrangements be structured and what counter-terrorist tactics should be pursued? How can these arrangements and tactics manage to be morally permissible as well as efficacious? This multi-disciplinary research project has as its main objective to provide an answer or set of answers to these pressing, yet highly complex and problematic, normative questions. While this question is essentially one of moral permissibility and, as such, one within applied philosophy (specifically, applied ethics), it requires both empirical input, including from international relations and from technical areas of computer science relevant to security (e.g. encryption), and legal input.
The area of focus of the research project is computer science, ethics and security. Applicants are expected to conduct original research on this area within the focus area of the ERC grant.
Requirements
Applicants are expected to conduct original research within the focus area of the ERC grant.
The PhD in Computer Science, Ethics and Security must:
• Hold an undergraduate degree in computer science.
• Hold a masters or undergraduate honours degree in computer science or philosophy.
• A background in technical areas of computer science relevant to security and intelligence collection issues (e.g. encryption, data mining) is desirable, as is a background in philosophical ethics or political philosophy.
Conditions of employment
The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, a discount for health insurance and sport memberships, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged. An International Children’s Centre offers childcare and an international primary school. Dual Career Services offers support to accompanying partners. Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.
As a PhD candidate you will be enrolled in the TU Delft Graduate School. The TU Delft Graduate School provides an inspiring research environment; an excellent team of supervisors, academic staff and a mentor; and a Doctoral Education Programme aimed at developing your transferable, discipline-related and research skills. Please visit http://graduateschool.tudelft.nl for more information.
Information and application
To apply, please e-mail a detailed CV, list of publications and references, and three samples of published scientific work along with a letter of application by 1 August 2016 to M. Koning, [email protected].
Please refer to vacancy number ATTBM16.008.
