Dr Geoff Ford, Digital Humanities / Political Science and International Relations
Associate Professor Jeremy Moses, Political Science and International Relations
In this seminar we will discuss our recent research on robot quadrupeds and drone swarms. This research has involved collecting and analysing large data-sets of texts using digital methods. We will talk about how we have gone about the research, some of the tools we have built, some of our findings, and implications for debates about regulating lethal autonomous weapons. We will also consider how digital methods complement traditional scholarship in the study of international relations.
About the ‘Mapping LAWS’ project:
Controversy around the development, regulation and use of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), or ‘killer robots’, has rapidly developed over the past decade. The ‘Mapping LAWS’ project uses methods and tools associated with ‘issue mapping’ to gather large digital datasets of published writing on LAWS, present the results in accessible visual formats inspired by the principles of ‘data humanism’, and analyse key international relations and policy-related issues that arise from that process.