Tag: FHNW School of Business

Posted on

Oliver Bendel Joins the University of Potsdam as Visiting Scholar

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel of the FHNW School of Business will be a visiting scholar at the University of Potsdam from September 1, 2026, to August 31, 2027. He considers himself a philosopher of technology, focusing on technology ethics and emerging fields of applied ethics, particularly information ethics, robot ethics, and machine ethics. In information ethics and robot ethics, he takes an empirically informed or empirically grounded approach that remains close to the subject matter. Ethical judgments are preceded by as precise an empirical and technical analysis as possible: The first step is to determine the specific characteristics of a given system, the functions it provides, the data it processes, and the effects it produces. Only on this basis are normative questions concerning issues such as informational autonomy, privacy, responsibility, or well-being examined. Normative claims are not derived from description alone, and empirical findings and normative premises remain clearly distinguishable. In machine ethics, Bendel complements this approach with a constructive-experimental methodology. He develops and tests prototypes himself, including specialized chatbots, voice assistants, and household robots in which moral rules are implemented. Here, construction serves as a method of inquiry: Its initial purpose is to demonstrate whether and how particular moral rules can be operationalized and implemented technically. The resulting artifacts are then systematically examined to reveal the possibilities, limitations, contradictions, and unexpected consequences of their implementation. This creates a feedback loop involving ethical conceptualization, technical construction, empirical testing, and ethical reflection. Overall, this methodology can therefore be characterized as an empirically grounded and constructive-experimental approach to technology ethics and related fields of research. Since 2022, Oliver Bendel has also been an associated researcher with the Potsdam Embodied Cognition Group (PECoG) at the University of Potsdam.

Posted on

WhereIsIt Project Comes to an End

On August 3, 2026, the final presentation of the WhereIsIt project took place at the FHNW School of Business. The project introduced a voice-based assistant that helps blind and visually impaired people remember and retrieve the locations of everyday objects through simple spoken interaction. Designed with a clear focus on accessibility and ease of use, the prototype works entirely offline, stores all data locally, and avoids cloud services and cameras, ensuring that sensitive personal information remains under the user’s control. The streamlined push-to-talk concept makes the application intuitive and focused on its core task: remembering where things are, while its local architecture demonstrates how AI can support users without compromising privacy. The project was initiated by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel of the FHNW School of Business, and the prototype was developed by Damian Huckele as part of his bachelor’s thesis. The project builds on several years of research into Inclusive AI at the FHNW School of Business. In 2024, Oliver Bendel presented his paper “How Can Generative AI Enhance the Well-being of the Blind?” at the AAAI Spring Symposium “Impact of GenAI on Social and Individual Well-being”. Based on extensive tests of the Be My Eyes app and its MLLM-powered Be My AI feature, the paper demonstrated how multimodal AI can significantly increase independence and environmental awareness for blind and visually impaired people, while also discussing the ethical implications of AI-mediated perception. This research laid an important conceptual foundation for subsequent projects. In 2025, the VISUAL project, initiated by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel and implemented by Doris Jovic, explored how multimodal AI could make wildlife livestreams accessible through detailed spoken scene descriptions generated from public webcam images. WhereIsIt now extends this line of work by shifting the focus from perception to memory support. Together, these activities illustrate how Inclusive AI can address different everyday challenges through practical, privacy-conscious, and user-centered applications that promote greater independence for blind and visually impaired people.