The human face has long been a site of social and cultural meaning, a marker of identity, emotion, and character. Today, it has become a source of medically relevant information, processed through algorithmic matching techniques that claim to detect genetic conditions, assess pain, predict neurological disorders, and decode the signs of disease. As these algorithmic faces migrate into clinical settings, it opens pressing questions not only about diagnostic accuracy, but about power, risk, and the politics of visibility.

Participants will engage with the clinical, ethical, and social dimensions of these tools, interrogating the nexus of medicine and surveillance and asking: who benefits from the making of algorithmic medical faces, and who is placed at risk? The workshop will also include a conversation with patient advocacy perspectives and will feature two keynote sessions open to online attendance.

Among the questions the workshop will investigate are:

• How is the face constructed as a diagnostic object, and what epistemic and economic forces shape that construction?
• What are the justice implications when algorithmic tools are deployed on marginalized or highly vulnerable populations, such as non-verbal patients with cerebral palsy? and
• What are the limits, legal, philosophical, and ethical, of recognition itself?

The workshop features two keynote lectures:

• Helena Machado (Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon) will speak on When Faces Become Health Data: The Limits of AI-in-Health Ethics, and
• Diana Miranda (University of Stirling) will deliver a keynote on Facial Coding (In)justice: Biometric Identification and Classification of Bodies.

The draft Workshop Programme can be found here. Please monitor this article for updates.

Online attendance of keynote sessions will be available to those interested: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3686091761015?p=hw8YxNB7NIqUfDd8KZ

Further information can be found at: www.codingfaces.com

Organizer/Contacts

The workshop is organized by the Chair for Philosophy and History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Ethical Data Initiative (EDI). For further information, please contact:

• Paul Trauttmansdorff – paul.trauttmansdorff@tum.de  
• Nathalia Uribe – nathalia.uribe@tum.de

Acknowledgements

The organizers acknowledge the financial support of the Friedrich Schiedel Fellowship Program for Technology in Society (2025–2026) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). The workshop is hosted by the TUM Think Tank at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy.