Our courses on AI ethics, policy, and governance

This course introduces students to the ethical, political and legal debates and transformations in relation to Artificial Intelligence and provides students with concepts and methods from the constructivist and interpretive social sciences to work towards responsible and democratic human-technology futures.

Generative AI is transforming education. Discover how to harness its power to create engaging,

Interested in using Generative AI in your scientific work processes but in responsible and ethical responsive way? This block course for PhD students allows experimenting with generative AI to generate texts, images and audio that can be used in science from scientific presentations to publications.

This introductory two-day course explores the potential and challenges of AI in contributing to sustainable and equitable development. Participants will learn about AI's applications in various fields, including healthcare, agriculture, and education, while addressing ethical concerns such as data privacy and algorithmic bias.

This workshop focuses on helping you find the right tools for your scientific writing project. We will discuss the key differences of the main currently available large language models so that you can select the most suitable one. We will outline what tasks are the most suited for AI assistance and how effective prompting techniques can help. Further topics are image generation and literature review tools. During the course, you will have the opportunity to collect hands-on experiences.

Do you want to become more technology-savvy in IT topics, and remain competitive in your field of expertise? The CAS ETH in Applied Information Technology (CAS ETH AIT) programme is part-time and uniquely suited for professionals and business executives without a technical/engineering degree and for experts looking to stay up to date with the latest IT developments.

The course fosters critical, culturally conscious reflection on AI development and regulation by:
1) exploring cross-cultural assessment of the concept of personhood and collective in digital society and how these concepts are reflected in AI development and regulation.
2) inspiring reflection on social justice issues stemming from major (mis)conceptions of personhood in AI development and governance.

This semester course enables students to recognize, anticipate and address ethical issues in the domain of health sciences and their technological application. The students will acquire the necessary theoretical and analytic resources to develop critical thinking skills in the field of applied ethics and will practice how to use such resources to address concrete ethical issues in health sciences

This course provides a thorough exploration of drug development and involved ethical issues as well as critical analysis of ethical challenges and practical skills to resolve them. It includes elements of drug discovery, preclinical and clinical research ethics, alternative regulatory pathways and ethics of drug pricing and develops a solid grasp of ethical complexity as well as practical skills.

In this seminar on "Critical Thinking", students are equipped with the essential skills needed to thrive in a dynamic, confusing and ever-changing field. It explores the fundamental principles of critical thinking and its application within the realm of research and technology.

This workshop focuses on understanding and managing the ethical and social issues arising from the integration of new technologies in various aspects of daily life.

Creating reliable, secure, robust, and fair machine learning models is a core challenge in artificial intelligence and one of fundamental importance. The goal of the course is to teach both the mathematical foundations of this new and emerging area as well as to introduce students to the latest and most exciting research in the space. 

This three-day short course offers a critical overview and understanding of the ethical and regulatory challenges triggered by the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in the health sector.

Visual analytics​​ supports the design of human-in-the-loop interfaces that enable human-machine collaboration. In this course, will go through the fundamentals of designing interactive visualizations, later applying them to explain and interact with machine leaning models.

This course explores the application of natural language processing techniques to texts in law, politics, and the news media. Students will put these tools to work in a course project.

Should we use this technology or not? What are the ethical opportunities and risks of this technological application? Should we always pursue all that is technically possible? What is ethics? How do ethics and technologies relate to each other? Does ethics hinder technological progress? How can ethics foster innovation? Which ethical theory should we apply in a global research-context? 

This course introduces core modeling techniques and algorithms from machine learning, optimization and control for reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, and study applications in areas such as robotics.

The course provides an overview of the scientific, religious, technical and philosophical debates on the human quest for the creation of artificial life and artificial intelligence. In exemplary readings with subsequent discussion, the course explores the question of which aspects of the topic literary texts since antiquity, visual art and film negotiate.

In this collaborative seminar for ZHdK and ETH Students, the aim is to bring together the creative vision and the technical expertise of both of Film and Information Technology and Electrical Engineering students to collaboratively craft a plot for a short film that explores the intricate ethical questions posed by the use of AI technologies.

Module in the CAS in Machine Learning in Finance and Insurance

This course introduces students to the ethical, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of digital technologies (big data, computing, Artificial Intelligence) and equips them with an interpretive social science toolkit for critical thinking and responsible action in a digital world.