
Simone van der BurgDe Waag · Faculty of Engineering
Simone van der Burg
PhD
As Head of Programme of the research group Code I focus on projects which realize publicly valued technologies.
About
73
Publications
15,123
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Introduction
As Head of programme of the research group Code Simone focusses on the question of how we can crack open the black box of technology in order to contribute to the research, design and development of digital spaces based on public values.
Main fields of interest are: responsible research and innovation, ethics, digitalisation, technologies for (genetic) diagnostics and screening, farming, value-sensitive design. (The nice picture is made by Jimena Gauna)
Additional affiliations
March 2018 - March 2022
Position
- Senior Researcher
Description
- I am a senior researcher and programme leader Responsible Digitalisation in agri-food. We're working on projects identifying and addressing the societal and ethical aspects of smart farming, robotization, digital twins and AI. Recently we started our ELSA lab on Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (ELSA) of AI, working toward trustworthy AI that supports the transition toward sustainable food systems.
November 2006 - September 2010
Publications
Publications (73)
Agribusinesses are investing in different forms of AI robots, as there is a lot of hope that these machines will help meet the challenges within the agricultural industry, which is to efficiently produce more food for a growing world population. AI robots are expected to enhance production, while compensating for lack of manpower, reducing producti...
These last years, the development of AI robots for agriculture, livestock farming and food processing industries is rapidly increasing. These robots are expected to help produce and deliver food more efficiently for a growing human population, but they also raise societal and ethical questions. As the type of questions raised by these AI robots in...
This article reflects on the contribution that stakeholder involvement could give to circular bioeconomy transformation (CBE). By comparing argument for stake-holder involvement in literature as well as on our own experiences in six stakeholder involvement workshops, we argue that it is probably unrealistic to fully achieve both normative and co-de...
The online availability of public services (e.g., digital registry, online forms to request passports or apply for financial support) is expected to enhance their efficiency, transparency and accessibility and to enforce values of equality and fairness in their provision. As these digital services become more ubiquitous, the question arises whether...
The sharing and use of data is one of the ways in which the European Commission seeks to boost the development of social economy organisations and allow them to contribute to an inclusive, green and fair economy and society. Data driven processes and sharing of data can foster robust and efficient collaborations, increase knowledge and innovation,...
The current research examines the emergent literature of Critical Data Studies, and particularly aligns with Michael and Lupton’s (2016) manifesto calling for researchers to study the Public Understanding of Big Data. The aim of this paper is to explore Irish stakeholders’ narratives on data sharing in agriculture, and the ways in which their attit...
To realize this deliverable, we have firstly provided an overview over the ethical issues that were already identified in the literature. After that, we explored the viewpoints of professionals working in research institutes and companies developing agricultural robots across Europe (27 participants in total) during five workshops, which we carried...
Digital Twins are computational representations of both living and non-living entities and processes, which can be used to analyse and simulate interventions in these entities and processes. When developing Digital Twins, it is important to anticipate on the societal, ethical and safety impacts they may have. Since in the agri-food domain Digital T...
The Mansholt lectures, named for the great Dutch European politician and thinker Sicco Mansholt, are organised by Wageningen University & Research to discuss European policy and issues in our domain: nutrition, agriculture and sustainable livelihoods.
In 2016 WUR started to organise the annual Mansholt lectures. During the lectures WUR presents mu...
During the 2021 Mansholt Lecture, which was presented to the European Commission in Brussels on 22 September 2021, WUR presented the options and challenges for stakeholders in the transition towards a sustainable digital innovation ecosystem. In this accompanying policy article we argue that Europe needs to consider creating an integral European po...
Digital farming technologies promise to help farmers make well-informed decisions that improve the quality and quantity of their production, with less labour and less impact on the environment. This future, however, can only become a reality if farmers are willing to share their data with agribusinesses that develop digital technologies. To foster...
This deliverable offers a synthesis of the work we’ve been doing in WP7. The question that WP7 set out to answer is whether and to what extent current ethical guidelines can be improved to build more trust in data sharing. The aim of this task is to look at current available ethical guidance to help build trust in farm data sharing, such as found i...
The sharing of farm data is a delicate topic, not only for farmers but also for agtech businesses and researchers. In order to find out how farmers, researchers agtech companies envision the data sharing future, including the conditions for their trust in data sharing, we organized a series of focus groups involving farmers, tech-providers and rese...
Ecosystem services delivery is influenced by food systems and vice versa. As the application of digital technologies in agriculture continues to expand, digital technologies might affect the delivery of ecosystem services in view of the sorts of food systems in which they are embedded. The direction food systems develop towards the future, and the...
The 1st National workshop on Smart Farming and Data Analytics took place at Maynooth University in Ireland on June 12, 2019. The workshop included two invited keynote presentations, invited talks and breakout group discussions. The workshop attracted in the order of 50 participants, consisting of a mixture of computer scientists, general scientists...
Background:
In ageing Western societies, many older persons live with and die from cancer. Despite that present-day healthcare aims to be patient-centered, scientific literature has little knowledge to offer about how cancer and its treatment impact older persons' various outlooks on life and underlying life values. Therefore, the aims of this pap...
What is the value of an early (presymptomatic) diagnosis of dementia in the absence of effective treatment? There has been a lively scholarly debate over this question, but until now (future) patients have not played a large role in it. Our study supplements biomedical research into innovative diagnostics with an exlporation of its meanings and val...
Sensors, drones, weather satellites and robots are examples of technologies that make farming ‘smart’. In this article we present the results of our review of the literature that concerns the ethical challenges that smart farming raises. Our reading suggests that current ethical discussion about smart farming circles around three themes: (1) data o...
Biomedical research policy in recent years has often tried to make such research more ‘translational’, aiming to facilitate the transfer of insights from research and development (R&D) to health care for the benefit of future users. Involving patients in deliberations about and design of biomedical research may increase the quality of R&D and of re...
Newborn screening (NBS) involves the collection of blood from the heel of a newborn baby and testing it for a list of rare and inheritable disorders. New biochemical screening technologies led to expansions of NBS programs in the first decade of the 21st century. It is expected that they will in time be replaced by genetic sequencing technologies....
The cover image, by Diane A. van der Biessen et al., is based on the Paper Understanding how Coping Strategies and Quality of Life maintain Hope in Patients deliberating Phase-I Trial Participation, DOI 10.1002/pon.4487.
Objective:
This study aimed to understand how hope and motivation of patients considering phase-I trial participation are affected by psychological factors such as coping strategies and locus of control (LoC), and general well-being as measured by the quality of life (QoL).
Methods:
An exploratory cross-sectional study was performed in patients...
Purpose:
Implementation of novel genetic diagnostic tests is generally driven by technological advances because they promise shorter turnaround times and/or higher diagnostic yields. Other aspects, including impact on clinical management or cost-effectiveness, are often not assessed in detail prior to implementation.
Methods:
We studied the clin...
Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypic...
The use of whole exome sequencing (WES) for diagnostics of children with rare genetic diseases raises questions about best practices in genetic counselling. While a lot of attention is now given to pre-test counselling procedures for WES, little is known about how parents experience the (positive, negative, or inconclusive) WES results in daily lif...
Newborn screening (NBS) involves a complex logistical process, which depends on the close cooperation of many professionals, such as midwives, laboratory technicians, general practitioners and pediatricians. These professionals may encounter moral problems in the process, which have not been systematically studied before. This study fills this gap....
As Whole Exome Sequencing (WES) is just starting to be used as a diagnostic tool in pediatric neurology for children with a neurological disorder, patient experiences and preferences with regard to counselling are relatively underexplored. This article explores experiences and preferences of parents with pre-test and post-test counselling in a tria...
Abstract
The number of embryos transferred after in vitro fertilization (IVF) have been a topic of
debate for over a decade now. Due to the risk associated with multiple pregnancy, there has
been a global effort at reducing the multiple pregnancy rates to a minimum while maintaining
an acceptable level of successful IVF pregnancy rate. Elective sin...
The diagnostic trajectory of complex paediatric neurology may be long, burdensome, and expensive while its diagnostic yield is frequently modest. Improvement in this trajectory is desirable and might be achieved by innovations such as whole exome sequencing. In order to explore the consequences of implementing them, it is important to map the curre...
The question we raise in this paper is, whether patient involvement might be a beneficial way to help determine and achieve the aims of translational (TR) research and, if so, how to proceed. TR is said to ensure a more effective movement ('translation') of basic scientific findings to relevant and useful clinical applications. In view of the fact...
The question we raise in this paper is, whether patient involvement might be a beneficial way to help determine and achieve the aims of translational (TR) research and, if so, how to proceed. TR is said to ensure a more effective movement ('translation') of basic scientific findings to relevant and useful clinical applications. In view of the fact...
It has often been questioned whether ethics on the laboratory floor is useful, because there is not yet a technology to evaluate in the earlier phases of research. In this article it is argued that ethics does not need the existence of the object it discusses, for its assessments to be meaningful. In discussion with Peter-Paul Verbeek’s ethics of d...
‘De stem van patiënten’ is een hulpmiddel om het gesprek met patiënten over medisch technisch onderzoek te structureren. De kaartmethode helpt patiënten om in een groepsbijeenkomst hun gedachten te bepalen over de effecten die de beoogde producten van dat onderzoek (zoals een nieuwe diagnostische test, of een geneesmiddel) op hun leven zou kunnen h...
People nowadays live in a human-made environment, or technotope. Their lives are entangled with technology. Because technology not only brings gifts but also costs and hazards, it is important to reflect on what good technology is and, indeed, whether a technology contributes to a good life.
The ethicists and social scientists united in this volu...
The timing of any ethics on the laboratory floor poses a challenge, which has been famously described by Collingridge’s dilemma of control. This dilemma claims, on the one hand, that it is hard to control a technology once it has finished developing because at that point too many parties—researchers, producers, investors—have an interest in putting...
In their 2007 paper, Swierstra and Rip identify characteristic tropes and patterns of moral argumentation in the debate about the ethics of new and emerging science and technologies (or "NEST-ethics"). Taking their NEST-ethics structure as a starting point, we considered the debate about tissue engineering (TE), and argue what aspects we think ough...
Theranostics signals the integrated application of molecular diagnostics, therapeutic treatment and patient response monitoring. Such integration has hitherto neglected another crucial dimension: coproduction of theranostic scientific knowledge, novel technological development and broader sociopolitical systems whose boundaries are highly porous. N...
Newborn screening consists of taking a few drops of blood from a baby's heel in the first week of life and testing it for a list of disorders. In the United States and most countries in Europe, newborn screening programs began in the 1960s and 1970s with screening for phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare metabolic disease that causes severe and irreversib...
In dit artikel stellen we ter discussie of het passend is om in het kader van de hielprikscreening
ouders te informeren over dragerschap bij hun kind en zo ja, om dat dan standaard
te doen of alleen op verzoek. We doen dit aan de hand van de casus sikkelcelziekte,
maar mutatis mutandis geldt hetzelfde voor (dragerschap voor) CF. Daarbij beperken we...
Usually ethicists pass judgment on a technology when it is already developed and ready to be put on the market. But at that
point it is often too late to alter anything about it. Ethicists who are embedded during the research-phase into a technology
are in a better position to negotiate such changes. However, there is no fully developed method avai...
There is a growing public policy interest in responsible innovation, which implies an enforcement of interdisciplinary communication between the engineering sciences and the social sciences or humanities anticipating and assessing the societal impacts of engineering research. This article focuses on an innovative brand of ethical technology assessm...
Since its advent, predictive DNA testing has been perceived as a technology that may have considerable impact on the quality of people's life. The decision whether or not to use this technology is up to the individual client. However, to enable well considered decision making both the negative as well as the positive freedom of the individual shoul...
Public funding institutions are able to influence what aspects researchers take into account when they consider the future impacts of their research. On the basis of a description of the evaluation systems that public research funding institutes in the Netherlands (STW and SenterNovem) use to estimate the quality of engineering science, this articl...
How can a realistic ethical imagination about the future of a technology take shape? This article contains a reflection which is based on the experiences of an embedded ethicist in the context of biophysical research conducive to the development of photoacoustic mammography, which is intended for the non-invasive detection of breast cancer. Imagina...
Hoe formuleer je een goede morele kritiek? In kritisch gezelschap onderzoekt de vraag hoe je een goede morele kritiek kunt vormen, zelfs als je er vanuit gaat dat moraliteit ontstaat in een cultuur. Die visie op de herkomst van moraal lijkt een vruchtbaar moreel debat in het dagelijks leven namelijk vaak in de weg te staan. De gangbare veronderstel...
This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck's trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition...
Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical un...