Venue: Room-31.C1.060

Abstract
"How safe is safe enough?" is a century-old question that has motivated the development of rational approaches for managing the safety of technological systems. In structural engineering, it has led to the search for target probabilities of failure that provide an acceptable level of life safety while making efficient use of societal resources.
The economic evaluation of safety standards naturally led to benefit--cost analysis and the need to assign an economic value to reductions in fatality risk, known as the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL). Despite its widespread use in regulations, the VSL remains controversial because of the ethical issues surrounding the monetary valuation of human life.
This seminar presents the Life-Quality Index (LQI), a social indicator that provides a societal basis for selecting target reliabilities in structural design. The LQI integrates the economic and life-safety consequences of structural safety decisions in a manner consistent with the principles of benefit-cost analysis.

Biography
Professor Mahesh Pandey is a distinguished researcher with over 20 years of experience in the probabilistic safety assessment of infrastructure systems. As an Industrial Research Chair, he leads a large research program funded by Canada's nuclear industry and the Science and Engineering Research Council. His research primarily focuses on the theory of stochastic processes and its applications to optimize the management of engineering systems. Dr. Pandey has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed research papers and served as a Co-Editor for the Journal of Reliability Engineering and System Safety.

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home