Institute News 2026

Oktober 2026. We are delighted to welcome Ümmü Gülsüm Varis and Johannes Krinke as the next two students from our institute to receive scholarships from the Deloitte Foundation.

Each year, two of our students are selected for the one-year scholarship programme, continuing a collaboration that provides them with both financial support and opportunities for personal and professional development. The scholarship recognises students who combine strong academic performance with outstanding commitment and personal initiative. Over the course of the programme, our two scholarship recipients will receive €500 in monthly financial support as well as opportunities to participate in exclusive networking events and talks. They will also become part of the Deloitte Foundation Talent Community and benefit from individual mentoring to support their personal and professional development.

We warmly congratulate Ümmü and Johannes on this achievement and wish them an inspiring and rewarding time as Deloitte Foundation scholarship holders. We look forward to following their future paths and their contributions to ethical and responsible technological innovation.

May 2026. We were delighted to co-host the HamburgAmbassador Meeting 2026 as a scientific partner this week, bringing together distinguished individuals from business, culture, and society from around the world, all united by a strong connection to Hamburg, to discuss how the city should position itself in the age of AI.

Andreas Timm-Giel, President of Technische Universität Hamburg, opened the gathering by underscoring the significance of TUHH’s motto, Technology for Humanity, setting the tone for a programme that consistently returned to the idea that ethics should be built into technical work, rather than added on afterwards.

Our institute’s Prof Dr Maximilian Kiener gave the ethics impulse. By interacting with an AI-based avatar, he vividly illustrated how every decision within a technical development process is inherently an ethical one. The question, therefore, is not whether to engage with ethics, but whether to do so deliberately. He also highlighted the Hamburg Declaration as the first global declaration to explicitly link responsible AI to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, marking a shift from “garbage in, garbage out” to “values in, values out”.

Alois Krtil, CEO of Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg (ARIC), offered a stocktaking of Hamburg’s position in the AI era, arguing that the city holds significant potential in the business-to-business AI sector. Marina Tcharnetsky, Chief Business Development Officer at ARIC, likewise focused on Hamburg’s AI landscape, emphasising that responsibility is essential wherever AI systems are integrated into critical infrastructure.

International perspectives followed. Prashant Rao traced the scale of India's data, talent base and the disruption that LLMs and AI agents are bringing to its IT services industry. Anton Scholz provided insights into Korea’s approach to AI, highlighting the country as a fast-adopting testbed with exceptionally high robot density and strong chip production. Nicole J. presented Canada as a global pioneer for trustworthy AI.

Closing reflections from Christian Pfromm, Chief Digital Officer of the Hamburg Senate, and Dr. Miriam Putz of the Handelskammer Hamburg, followed by a panel discussion together with Max Kiener and Alois Krtil, brought the central theme into focus: Hamburg’s potential as a hub for business-to-business AI and as a public-sector market rests on embedding responsibility at its core.

A warm thank you to the city of Hamburg, ARIC, AI.IMPACT, Handelskammer Hamburg and all speakers and ambassadors for an exchange that brought local ambition and global experience into close dialogue!

A short report on the Hamburg Ambassador Meeting by NDR Hamburg Journal can be watched here.

May 2026. Our student-led initiative Blue Engineering Hamburg was invited to the Presidium of the Technische Universität Hamburg, where Vice President for Teaching Prof. Thorsten A. Kern presented the students with the certificate recognising their success at this year’s Harburg Sustainability Award.

What made the meeting particularly special was the opportunity for an extended exchange: Prof. Kern took an entire hour to speak with the students about their innovative teaching format, in which students teach and learn from other students while engaging with questions of ethics, responsibility, and sustainability in engineering.

The seminar “Exploring the Altruistic Potential of Careers – A Blue Engineering Seminar” encourages critical reflection on the social, ecological, and economic dimensions of technological decision-making. Instead of relying on traditional lecture formats, the course creates space for discussion, reflection, and collaborative approaches to ethical decision-making.

As the Institute for Ethics in Technology, we are delighted to support the initiative  — and even more delighted to see this kind of student engagement receiving wider recognition. Congratulations to everyone involved!

April 2026. The Institute is proud to announce that a recent article by our own Maximilian Kiener is among the top 10 most cited papers published in 2024 in the prestigious Journal of Applied Philosophy. The paper, titled “AI and Resposibility: No Gap But Abundance”, offers a shift in the ongoing debate on AI and responsibility. While much of the current discourse suggests that the use of AI leads to gaps in responsibility, that is, situations in which no clear agent can be held responsible when things go wrong, Max challenges this view. Instead, he argues that AI systems often generate an abundance of responsibility. The real challenge, therefore, is not a lack of responsibility, but how to meaningfully navigate and distribute this surplus of responsibility in practice. The article is available as open access. Find it here

February 2026. We are pleased to announce that the student-led initiative Blue Engineering TUHH has been awarded third place at the Harburg Sustainability Award 2026.

Launched in October 2024, the TUHH Blue Engineering group is part of a Germany-wide network that empowers engineering students to develop and deliver their own teaching formats on social and ecological responsibility. The initiative is supervised by the Institute for Ethics in Technology, ensuring an academic foundation while preserving its student-driven character. Through peer-to-peer teaching and collaborative learning, Blue Engineering provides a space for critical engagement with the broader societal implications of technology.

The award recognises not only the quality of the group’s work, but also its commitment to fostering responsible and sustainability-oriented engineering education. 

January 2026. The Institute for Ethics in Technology looks back on a highly successful book launch workshop on Maximilian Kiener’s Moral Responsibility and Artificial Intelligence, which took place on 8 January 2026 and was hosted by the Uehiro Institute in Oxford. The discussions centred on how responsibility can be understood and fairly attributed in the design, deployment, and governance of AI systems. The workshop brought together international scholars for in-depth exchange and future research perspectives inspired by Max’s book. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Deloitte Foundation, which made this academic exchange possible.