Colloquium: AI Ethics by Francesca Rossi, IBM

Computer Science and Computation and Society Colloquium

Title: AI Ethics

Speaker:  Francesca Rossi, IBM Research

Abstract:

AI is going to bring huge benefits in terms of scientific progress, human wellbeing, economic value, and the possibility of finding solutions to major social and environmental problems. Supported by AI, we will be able to make more grounded decisions and to focus on the main values and goals of a decision process rather than on routine and repetitive tasks. However, such a powerful technology also raises some concerns, related for example to the black-box nature of some AI approaches, the possible discriminatory decisions that AI algorithms may recommend, and the accountability and responsibility when an AI system is involved in an undesirable outcome. Also, since many successful AI techniques rely on huge amounts of data, it is important to know how data are handled by AI systems and by those who produce them. These concerns are among the obstacles that hold AI back or that cause worry for current AI users, adopters, and policy makers. Without answers to these questions, many will not trust AI, and therefore will not fully adopt it nor get its positive impact. In this talk I will present the main issues around AI ethics, describe some of the proposed technical solutions, and mention some of the many initiatives that have been built in the past few years to address the technical, policy, and legal challenges, as well as the ethical concerns, around AI.

Biography:

IBM AI Ethics Global Leader and Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research. Previously, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Padova, Italy. Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multiagent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behaviour of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. She has published over 190 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters. She has co-authored a book and she has edited 17 volumes, between conference proceedings, collections of contributions, special issues of journals, and a handbook. She is a fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI) and of the European one (EurAI). She has been president of IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI), an executive councillor of AAAI, and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of AI Research. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute (Cambridge, USA) and a deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (Cambridge, UK). She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous intelligent systems and she is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI, where she represents IBM as one of the founding partners. She is a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI and the general chair of the AAI 2020 conference.