Virtue in Virtual Spaces

Louisa Conwill is a PhD student in computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses include computer vision, human-computer interaction, and technology ethics, and she has a particular interest in how the teachings of the Catholic Church can inform technology ethics. A graduate of Brown University, Louisa worked as a software engineer for Amazon Alexa and served as a campus missionary with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) before starting her graduate studies at Notre Dame.   Megan Levis is an assistant professor of the practice with the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns and College of Engineering. She holds a PhD in bioengineering and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Notre Dame's Technology Ethics Center and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research interests relate to questions concerning how technology shapes the cultural understanding of what it means to be human and how technology can be designed to encourage virtue and the common good. Levis is also working to bring character formation into engineering curricula.    Walter Scheirer is the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is a global technology leader, serving as the chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and as a board member of the Computer Vision Foundation. Scheirer is also a cultural critic and historian, commenting on the social context of emerging technologies from the realistic perspective of a technologist, and promoting technology development informed by Catholic Social Teaching that upholds the common good.