Jeroen de Haas receives NWO doctoral grant

This month, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) announced the receipients of its latest funding round of Doctoral Grants for Teachers. Among the awardees is Jeroen de Haas, a teacher at Avans University of Applied Sciences, who will pursue his PhD in the TU/e Philosophy & Ethics group.

According to NWO, “Twenty-four teachers received this grant, with a total of over EUR 4.9 million being awarded. Annually, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science makes 9 million euros available for the PhD positions. With the grant, the teachers receive the opportunity to further develop themselves and to strengthen the link between universities and schools.” The grant provides teachers with five years of funding for their PhD research.

de Haas's project is entitled, "Understanding Software: Towards an Analytic Ontology of Computational Artefacts." In the summary of the project, he writes, "Society is digitizing at an incredible pace. The impact of failing software on society grows accordingly. But what is software? What is its function? Can it fail? Governments, scholars and engineers have difficulty articulating such questions and their answers. For material artefacts — human-made objects— there exist ontologies that prescribe how to reason about their function and malfunction. Initial attempts to translate these analyses to software lead to counter-intuitive or contradictory conclusions. In this research, we uncover these problems to then construct an ontology that better aligns with reality and thus provides a solid foundation for scientific and societal debates."