Ethical Trust

Stuart Diamond is the creator of Optimal Trust and Ethical Trust, a multidimensional framework for understanding, analyzing, and strengthening trust among individuals, organizations, and the larger systems in which they operate.

Diamond's work draws upon an unusually diverse career spanning philosophy, business, digital technology, journalism, and contemporary music. His early philosophical interests, developed while studying at Haverford College, ultimately led to a fundamental question: What is trust, how does it function, and why is it so essential to virtually every aspect of human society?

As co-founder of Empowered Media and Empowered Medical Media, Diamond was an early participant in the digital media revolution. His work included consulting for major defense contractors, Fortune 500 corporations, international human rights organizations, the United Nations, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on counterterrorism strategies. As editor-in-chief of Empowered Doctor, he oversaw the publication of thousands of medical news stories and the production of major healthcare media initiatives, including the National Physician of the Year Awards.

His exploration of trust took formal shape through educational programs developed for the financial services industry, examining the relationship between trust, financial institutions, and the functioning of economic systems. This work culminated in The Power and Profitability of Trust, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2012. In 2018, working in association with the Center for Ethics at St. Thomas University, Diamond further developed and presented the framework as Ethical Trust, extending its application to broader questions of ethics, institutional responsibility, and human relationships.

Beyond his business and academic work, Diamond has enjoyed a distinguished career as a composer and performer of contemporary classical and electronic music. He received a major fellowship from the Criterion Foundation supporting six years devoted to composition, performance, and the exploration of emerging musical technologies. His work has consistently sought to bridge technological innovation with artistic expression.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Haverford College, with studies in Music (Honors) and Philosophy, Diamond subsequently received a full fellowship for graduate study at Sarah Lawrence College. He served for nine years on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and was a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, promoting the value of the liberal arts at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Throughout these seemingly disparate pursuits runs a consistent intellectual interest: understanding the complex relationships that connect people, institutions, ideas, and systems. Ethical Trust represents the continuing development of that inquiry.

Arthur Kane is the Founding Director of the Center for Ethics at St. Thomas University in Florida, established in 2000 through a generous gift from the Joseph and Marilyn Sciortino Family Foundation.

Art's distinguished and unconventional career spans three worlds: religious service, business leadership, and academic philosophy. After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross, he entered the Jesuit order and served in Jamaica, where he directed a social action center in Kingston and helped establish agricultural cooperatives to improve the lives of sugar workers. After leaving the priesthood, he moved to Florida, became a vice president of Norwegian Cruise Line, and subsequently established his own consulting business.

Returning to his intellectual roots, Art joined the philosophy faculty at St. Thomas University, where he taught for approximately 20 years. As Founding Director of the Center for Ethics, he sought to move ethical inquiry beyond the classroom into the practical challenges confronting businesses, government, and communities.

That commitment to bridging philosophical principles and real-world decisions provided an important institutional setting for the development of Ethical Trust in 2018, bringing the established Optimal Trust framework into a broader exploration of ethics, human relationships, and institutional responsibility.

Thomas Roedel is our Chief Technology Officer.

Thomas Roedel is a data scientist, machine learning engineer, senior software engineer in high performance computing, embedded systems, computer vision, robotics, and deep learning. His expertise includes enterprise class system architecture, multi-process, multi-threaded applications, distributed, parallel and real time computing, including machine learning algorithms.

Recently he has been principal researcher, responsible for development of sense and avoid technology and computer vision algorithm for object detection, localization of aircraft, drones in a ground-based and on-board embedded systems utilizing deep learning and probabilistic algorithms.

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