India
24–28 February 2025, New Delhi
FOCUS GROUPS
(Im)mortality over Dinner
The idea of „(Im)mortality over Dinner” refers to the well-established concept of „Death over Dinner,” initiated by Michael Hebb in 2013. These “dinners” provide a pretext to discuss the often-taboo topic of death and dying in a relaxed, inclusive, open, and respectful atmosphere. This unique gathering will be an opportunity to reflect on what a good death might be, including digital death. Would you like to have the possibility to meet online with your deceased loved one? Would you want your data to be used to create your postmortem bot for future generations? Or would you prefer to disappear from virtual space without leaving any trace? The dinner is hosted by Anja Franczak, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, and Tomasz Siuda. The meeting will be conducted in English. The number of places is limited.
Instructions for Participants
- To participate, you need to attend the screening of the documentary “Eternal You”
- Choose a date for the “(Im)mortality over Dinner” (you can find the program below) and submit your application.
- If accepted, you will receive a confirmation email.
- If accepted, you will be asked to bring a photo of a close deceased person who will symbolically participate with us in the meeting.
- “Dinner” will be served punctually at 6 p.m. We ask you to attend the IIC at least 15 minutes before the start.
- Casual attire is suggested—your comfort and convenience are most important!
- “(Im)mortality over Dinner” is not a support group and is not recommended for people in acute grief or who have lost a loved one in the last 6 months.
- The meeting will be recorded, and the collected material will be analysed for research. Your data will be hosted at the Cambridge University digital servers.
- Any information you share will remain anonymous. However, video recordings will be used to create a short promotional clip for the project. Unfortunately, we cannot include you in the project if you do not consent to being videotaped.
- Following the “(Im)mortality over Dinner” event, there will be an opportunity for a personalised photo session. Participation is voluntary, but we warmly encourage you to participate if you feel ready and willing. The brief session will last just a few minutes, resulting in a unique black-and-white portrait (you can view previous examples here). As a gesture of appreciation, you will receive the portrait in digital format as a gift from us.
The detailed program will be confirmed soon.
APPLICATION FORM
If you’re interested in participating,
please fill out the application form
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Katarzyna Nowaczyk - Basińska
Principal Investigator
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Stephen Cave
Experts Workshop Moderator
Stephen Cave is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, particularly AI, robotics and life-extension. He is the author of Immortality (Crown, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year, and Should You Choose To Live Forever: A Debate (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023); and co-editor of AI Narratives (OUP, 2020), Feminist AI (OUP, 2023) and Imagining AI (OUP, 2023). He writes widely about philosophy, technology and society, including for the Guardian and Atlantic. He also advises governments around the world, and has served as a British diplomat.
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Tomasz Hollanek
Experts Workshop Moderator
Tomasz Hollanek is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, working at the intersection of AI ethics and critical design.
His ongoing research explores the possibility of applying critical design methods – prioritising the goals of social justice and environmental sustainability – in the governance, development, and deployment of AI systems. This includes work on the ethics of human-AI interaction design (in particular, the design of companion chatbots and griefbots) and the In-depth EU AI Act Toolkit, helping developers translate the requirements of the European Union’s AI Act into design practice. At LCFI, he also leads the research stream dedicated to AI, Journalism, and Communications.
Previously, Tomasz was a Vice-Chancellor’s PhD Scholar at Cambridge and a Visiting Research Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has contributed to numerous research projects, including the Global AI Narratives Project at LCFI and the Ethics of Digitalization research program at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
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Saide Mobayed Vega
Research Assistant
Saide Mobayed Vega will contribute to the ‘Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI: An Intercultural Analysis’ project at the CFI. She is a sociologist focusing on STS, digital sociology, critical data studies, human rights, and gender-based violence. Saide is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, where she investigates how feminicide—the gender-related killing of women and girls—becomes translated into numerical data from global data sets to local data stories.
Saide has extensive experience in academic, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural work. She has co-organised numerous international conferences and workshops, including the Big Data & Society 2023 Colloquium: ‘Data Practices and Digital Social Worlds’ and the ‘Crossing Data: Building Bridges with Activist and Academic Practices from and for Latin America’ for CHI in 2022. Saide co-edited The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, a collection of 50 chapters that offers an in-depth global examination of femicide and feminicide from various perspectives and disciplines.
Saide has been actively involved in public engagement. In 2017, she co-founded the ongoing ‘Femi(ni)cide Watch Platform’, with the UN Studies Association. From 2021-2022, she served as president of the Cambridge University Mexican Society. Before Cambridge, Saide collaborated with international and non-governmental organisations on human rights and gender-based violence projects, including UNODC and ARTICLE19.
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Anja Franczak
Focus Groups Moderator
Educator in the field of dying, death and grief. Founder of the Institute of the Good Death, an innovative and awarded social movement in Poland. Anja supports people in the final stages of life, people grieving the loss of a loved one, and those who work with them in hospitals, hospices and funeral homes. She also is a ritual celebrant, creating and leading personal farewell rituals and funeral ceremonies. Trained in Heidelberg at the Institute for Clinical Pastoral Care (Institut für Klinische Seelsorgeausbildung) as a professional grief counsellor certified by the Federal Association of Bereavement Counselling in Germany (Bundesverband Trauerbegleitung e.V.). As an end-of-life doula and certified instructor of the international initiative Last Aid Courses (Letzte Hilfe), she educates about the dying process and supports families who are caring for a loved one approaching the end of life.
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Tomasz Siuda
Photographer / Artist
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Debayan Gupta
Debayan Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University, where he teaches a course on security and privacy as well as an introductory programming class. He is also a visiting professor and research affiliate at MIT and MIT-Sloan.
Before coming to Ashoka, Debayan held an Extraordinary Faculty position in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he taught courses like 6.042, 6.006, and 6.046. He has a PhD from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
Debayan’s primary areas of interest include secure computation, cryptography, and privacy. He also occasionally dabbles in number theory, complexity theory, robotics, and machine learning (and, on rare occasions, economics). He has helped start a number of companies in India and abroad, and as such, holds board positions in a number of start-ups. He also consults for and advises companies on cybersecurity, helping c-suite individuals understand and mitigate cyber-risk.
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Daniel Weltman
Daniel Weltman is an associate professor in the Philosophy department at Ashoka University. He works on social and political philosophy, ethics, and gender.
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Ayush Sharma
Ayush Sharma is an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Philosophy at Ashoka University, Class of 2026. His research and academic interests are computational logic, high-order logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics and theology. Feel free to contact me: ayush.sharma_ug25@ashoka.edu.in)
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Aalok Thakkar
Aalok Thakkar is an assistant professor in the department of Computer Science at Ashoka University. He specializes in the areas of programming languages, formal methods, and artificial intelligence. His recent research focuses on generating correct programs from user-provided specification of program behavior, as well as understanding the limitations of computing and AI.
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Maya Indira Ganesh
Maya Indira Ganesh is Associate Director (Research Partnerships), co-director of the Narratives and Justice Program, and a Senior Research Fellow at CFI. From October 2021- July 2024 she was an assistant teaching professor at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) where she co-directed the MSt in AI Ethics and Society run jointly between ICE and LCFI.
Maya has a Drphil in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Her doctoral work took the case of the ‘ethics of autonomous driving’ to study the implications of ethical decision-making and governance by algorithmic/AI technologies for human social relations, and argued for a conception of AI technologies as situated in distinct infrastructural and social environments. Her monograph, Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car is available for pre-order here and the introductory chapter is free to read here. Maya’s research at CFI builds on this by focusing on AI in public and with different kinds of publics in the design and development of technology. She draws on varied theoretical and methodological genres, including feminist scholarship, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies. She is also an invited speaker, curatorial advisor, and writer with arts and cultural organisations in Europe, and on the internet. Prior to academia, Maya spent over a decade as a researcher and activist working at the intersection of gender justice, security, and digital freedom of expression. An up-to-date list of publications, talks, and cultural practice can be found here.
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Kranti Saran
Kranti Saran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy in 2011, and has since been a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Most recently, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Delhi. You can find more information about him at http://krantisaran.net/.
His research interests span the areas of perception, attention, bodily awareness, introspection, mimicry, and how these topics are related to our moral relation to others. A common thread that runs through his research is a concern with understanding facets of our cognition: its faculties and modes (perception, attention), its embodiment (bodily awareness), its consequences for our relation to our selves and our immediate social milieu (introspection, mimicry), and finally, the manner in which these topics interact with culture and so either constrain or enable dimensions of our moral relation to others.