UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.  — Two free public lectures by internationally respected experts highlight a two-day symposium focused on ethics that will be conducted Oct. 10-11 on the University Park campus.

“Challenges to Digital Media Flourishing,” hosted by the Don Davis Program in Ethical Leadership, will bring together ethics and thought leaders from all over the world for the two-day event. Along with meetings and presentations, the schedule includes a public lecture at 9 a.m. each day in the HUB-Robeson Center Flex Theater.

On Oct. 10, Professor Shannon Vallor from the University of Edinburgh will present “In a Mirror, Dimly: Why AI Can’t Tell Our Stories, and Why We Must.”

Vallor, the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh Futures Institute, is a former artificial intelligence ethicist at Google. She is the author of “The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking” (Oxford, 2024) and “Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to A Future Worth Wanting” (Oxford, 2016).

On Oct. 11, Professor Nick Couldry of the London School of Economics will present “The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity (And Ethics) Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t?”

Couldry is a professor of media, communications and social theory in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics whose work also has spanned media ethics and journalism studies. He is the co-editor of “Ethics of Media” (Palgrave, 2013), and the forthcoming “The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can't?” (Polity, 2024).

The symposium is co-sponsored by the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication, and the Rock Ethics Institute housed in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State.