KEYNOTE TALK –
Make Kindness Not Rage: Engineering for Prosociality

Much of the discourse around responsible technology has, understandably, focused on a version of the Hippocratic injunction: “first, do no harm.” But the Hippocratic tradition asks more than simply avoiding harm: it also carries a positive obligation to act for the benefit of others.

What would it mean to bring a similar ambition to technology? Can we engineer digitally enabled systems not only to mitigate harms, but deliberately to create opportunities for people to help, care for and cooperate with one another? Drawing on my work in software engineering, the Digital Humanism Initiative and Responsible AI UK, I will explore what it might mean to engineer for prosociality — and why responsible software engineers should concern themselves not only with what technology must not do, but also with the human good it might help make possible.

About the speaker:

Bashar Nuseibeh is a Professor of Computing and Executive Dean of the School of Science & Technology at City St. George’s, University of London. He serves as Research Pillar Chair of Responsible AI UK (RAi UK) and is an Adjunct Professor of Software & Systems at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Previously he was Professor of Software Engineering and Chief Scientist of Lero – Ireland’s national software research centre – and a Professor of Computing at The Open University where he continues his association as an Emeritus Professor. He was a Lecturer and a Reader (associate professor) in Computing at Imperial College London, and Head of its Software Engineering Laboratory. He continued his association with Imperial as a Visiting Research Fellow (2001-2005) and then Visiting Professor (2005-2015). He was reappointed as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computing in May 2026. Professor Nuseibeh is also an Honorary Professor at University College London (UCL), and a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin (UCD) and the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan.

He serves on the advisory boards of QUB CSIT, the Bernoulli Institute, and on the Steering Committee of the Digital Humanism Initiative. He previously served on the EPSRC ICT Strategic Advisory Team (SAT) and on the ERC Informatics Panel (PE6) for Advanced Grants. He served as Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), and was Elected Chair of IFIP Working Group 2.9 on Requirements Engineering.