Chhanda Chakraborti

e-mail: chhanda at iitj.ac.in, head_sme@iitj.ac.in

About myself: Chhanda Chakraborti is an active thinker, author, and a Professor of Philosophy. Recipient of many awards and fellowships, she has over 30 years of experience of research guidance, multidisciplinary research collaboration, curriculum development, and teaching as a tenure track faculty at premier Institutes in India, and had visited several universities abroad. After retirement from IIT Kharagpur, she has joined IIT Jodhpur to join hands in Institution-building effort.

Current role:

Head, School of Management and Entrepreneurship, IIT Jodhpur.
Chairperson, Committee for Celebration of Commemorative Days (CCCD, IIT Jodhpur)
Visiting Professor, School of Liberal Arts, IIT Jodhpur
Affiliated Faculty, School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, IIT Jodhpur

Research Projects:

Her two on-going sponsored projects are as follows:

1. ‘'An interdisciplinary study of Technologically Manipulated Information: Its ecosystem and its psycho-social impact'.

2. 'Digital Twins: negotiating identity and translocated heritage in the global age

Her forthcoming book from Springer Nature is ‘Introduction to Ethics: Concepts and cases’.

With over 100 publications, and a varied range of research interests, which includes the experience of working successfully with multidisciplinary teams, she is eager to learn and do more.

Her current research interests and active publication areas are:

Bioethics
Ethics and AI
Public Health Ethics
Logic
Philosophy of Mind.

SPONSORED RESEARCH PROJECTS

Current Funded Research Project: 'An interdisciplinary study of Technologically Manipulated Information: Its ecosystem and its psycho-social impact'

Funding agency: Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), India

Current role: Project Director

Co-PIs: Dr. Ankita Sharma (Psychology), Dr Prasenjeet Tribhuvan (Sociology), Dr Rajendra Nagar (Electrical Engineering), IIT Jodhpur

Duration: 2 years 2022-2024

A brief description of the project:

Social media information, which sometimes is deftly manipulated by current AI tools, such as deep learning, to generate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation, takes advantage of the unsuspecting gullibility of the end-users and has a great potential to manipulate their belief systems. Potential abuse of such manipulated information poses a veritable threat to individual privacy and social peace and cohesion in the present information age.

The present study strives to make a more holistic attempt to equip ourselves against such a threat. It will try to better understand the psycho-social impact of technologically manipulated information on social media users, at both individual and group levels, and will bring out the potential ethical implications of the problem. It also will try to understand the role the socio-cultural factors play in heightening the credibility and consequently causing such manipulated information ‘to go viral’. On the other hand, it will try to capture the principles, the motivation, and the strategies of the social institutions and organizations which work against such misinformation /disinformation, and verify the information for its factual authenticity, and identify the possibility of technological manipulation. Finally, it aims to come up with policy recommendations and a set of interventions.

2. Indo-Swiss Joint Research Project :

Title: Digital Twins: negotiating identity and translocated heritage in the global age

Awarded: September 2022

Duration: 36 Months

Funding agency: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), ICSSR India

Brief description of the project:

This project aims to address urgent transnational challenges of heritage and cultural exchange specific to this global age of digitization and the translocation of art treasures. 'Digital Twins: Negotiating identity and translocated heritage in the global age' unites for the first-time humanities, digital heritage and social science experts at EPFL (Lausanne) Switzerland, IIT Jodhpur, and Université de Genève to grapple with compound predicaments facing museums and curators worldwide to ethically, democratically, and equitably distribute their collections todiverse, internationally located audiences.

'Digital Twins' contends with major transformations in heritage practice impacting both India and Switzerland, bridging the gap in the state-of-the-art in three domains. One, the circulation of art treasures and of heritage in a digitized form, making heritage a translocated phenomenon, and the psycho-social ramifications for local and transnational identity. Two, digital twins as a means to revolutionize heritage distribution and access in the present post-conflict and postcolonial era of rapidly changing values and increasing risk. Three, the potential of digital twins combined with blockchain technologies to enable more equitable, trustworthy, and ethical distribution of heritage to resolve issues in copyright, data security and privacy, as well as contested provenance for a postcolonial and global age.

Our recent activity:

An International Workshop 'Changing Paradigms: Digital twins and Buddhist Heritage in the Global Age'. January 22, 2024, India International Center, New Delhi.

https://sites.google.com/iitj.ac.in/digitaltwin-heritage-identity/home

Invited Talk: At Maria Grzegorzewska University, Warsaw, Poland. On: June 12, 2023. Title of the Talk: The Phenomenon of Systemic Negligence and its implications for Moral and Political Responsibility.

Abstract: This paper tries to delineate the concept of systemic negligence as a distinct kind of negligence in the specific context of health systems, particularly in the developing countries, that needs to be recognized and addressed. The paper argues that systemic negligence is not just a mere collection of stray incidences of medical errors and system failures in a health system, but is a more pervasive kind of neglect which often is not traceable to one particular agent or a group of agents.

The lecture will go further to bring out the concept of systemic negligence from its Bioethical context, and to place it in the wider discourse in ethics. The lecture will argue that the concept of systemic negligence raises difficulty for the usual understanding of moral responsibility. It will use the concepts of structural injustice and political responsibility, as advocated by Iris Marion Young, as a pointer to conclude that accepting systemic negligence as a phenomenon does not preclude the possibility of positing moral responsibility.

Visit: https://www.aps.edu.pl/aktualnosci/wizyta-goscinna-prof-chhandy-chakraborti/

With the Vice Chancellor Prof Anna Odrowaz-Coates, and others

Invited talks:

At the International Seminar on "Morals Matter: Ethics and Human Behaviour", May 18-20, 2022. My presentation was on May 19, 2022, in the Second Academic Session, 11:50 - 1 PM.

Organized by Center for Indological Studies and Research, The Ramakrishna Institute of Culture, Gol Park, Kolkata, India.

The title of my paper is:

On the Origin and Nature of Ethics and Ethical Values

2. Chhanda Chakraborti, Invited talk, ‘School of Liberal Arts Initiative at IIT Jodhpur and NEP 2020’, IIT Jodhpur NEP Workshop, September 3, 2022