Helsinki ICT Research Day
When
Where
Schedule
Come join us on Helsinki ICT Research Day! Join your fellow researchers from the Aalto University Department of Computer Science, Department of Information and Communications Engineering, and the University of Helsinki Department of Computer Science. More info to come!
Our early career researchers will provide a 5-minute-pitch about their research. Below is the order in which they will appear:
| Order | Name |
| 1 | Christian Guckelsberger |
| 2 | Juhi Kulshrestha |
| 3 | Suhas Thejaswi |
| 4 | Raphael Weidhaas |
| 5 | Sebastian Szyller |
| 6 | Qi Chen |
| 7 | Mohammad Vali |
| 8 | Haoye Tian |
| 9 | Niklas Halonen |
| 10 | Aakash Ravindra Shinde |
| 11 | Verena Distler |
More information about the poster session will come later
Title: What Should We Trust AI to Do? Agency, Delegation, and Digital Ethics from Software Agents to Agentic AI
Abstract:
Thirty years ago, my master's thesis explored agent-based systems, i.e. pieces of software designed to act autonomously on a user's behalf. What was then a research curiosity has become everyday infrastructure: AI agents now make consequential decisions in our work, institutions, and private lives. This talk traces that arc and asks the questions it forces on us. What do we actually want to delegate to machines, and what should we keep for ourselves? How and why do we come to trust AI systems? What is it, exactly, that we are trusting, and when is that trust misplaced?
Drawing on recent years of teaching Digital Ethics at Aalto University, I will argue that agency and trust are not technical properties to be engineered into a system, but contested ethical terrain. Design choices are never value-neutral, and the principles of trustworthy AI run into real tensions in practice: transparency against privacy, autonomy against beneficence, fairness against accuracy. Frameworks for trustworthy AI don't resolve these tensions; they name them. The choices about what we delegate, and what we trust machines to do, are made in the systems we design. The ethical question is not whether those choices are being made, but who is making them, and on whose behalf.
Registration is open until 15.5.2026.