Daniel Huttenlocher, co-author of The Age of AI And Our Human Future joins a panel of commentators in Oxford. Discussion will be based around questions that the book seeks to explain. Questions such as:
- What do AI-enabled innovations in health, biology, space, and quantum physics look like?
- What do AI-enabled 'best friends' look like, especially to children?
- What does AI-enabled war look like?
- Does AI perceive aspects of reality humans do not?
- When AI participates in assessing and shaping human action, how will humans change?
- What, then, will it mean to be human?
The Institute for Ethics in AI will bring together world-leading philosophers and other experts in the humanities with the technical developers and users of AI in academia, business and government. The ethics and governance of AI is an exceptionally vibrant area of research at Oxford and the Institute is an opportunity to take a bold leap forward from this platform.
Every day brings more examples of the ethical challenges posed by AI; from face recognition to voter profiling, brain machine interfaces to weaponised drones, and the ongoing discourse about how AI will impact employment on a global scale. This is urgent and important work that we intend to promote internationally as well as embedding in our own research and teaching here at Oxford.
Image credit: Keiko Ikeuchi
Professor Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously he helped found Cornell Tech, the digital technology-orientated graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City, and served as its first Dean and Vice Provost. His research and teaching have been recognised by a number of awards including ACM Fellow and CASE Professor of the Year. Huttenlocher's main research interests are in computer vision, social media, and understanding AI. He has a mix of academic and industry background, having been a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell, researcher and manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and CTO of a fintech startup. He currently serves as the board chair of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and as a member of the board of Corning Inc. and Amazon.com. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, and master's and doctorate from MIT.
Commentators
Professor Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law and former Dean (2004-09) at Yale Law School, where he has taught since 1985. A Korean-American, he graduated from Harvard, Magdalen College, Oxford (PPE Marshall Scholar 1977), and Harvard Law School, and has received 17 honorary degrees and more than thirty awards for his work in human rights and international law.
Professor Koh has served under four US presidents, as Senior Advisor (2021-present) and Legal Adviser to the US Secretary of State (2009-2013) (Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award), Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (1998-2001), and Attorney-Adviser at the US Department of Justice (1983-1985). He also served in the judicial branch, as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the US Supreme Court, and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. An Honorary Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn and associated Member of the Blackstone Chambers, he is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and served as Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Clarendon Lecturer in Law at the Oxford Law Faculty, Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College, Waynflete Lecturer at Magdalen College, and Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science and Fellow of Trinity and Christ’s Colleges, Cambridge.
He is the author of eight books and more than 200 articles, has argued regularly before US and international courts, and testified frequently before the United States Congress. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute, and received the Wolfgang Friedmann Award from Columbia Law School and the Louis B. Sohn Award from the American Bar Association for his lifetime achievements in international law. During his year at Balliol as Eastman Professor, he will be affiliated with the Faculty of Law, the Blavatnik School of Government, and the Bonavero Human Rights Institute.
Marietje Schaake is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies. Marietje is an (Advisory) Board Member with a number of non-profits including MERICS, ECFR, ORF and AccessNow. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-weekly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper.
Professor Alison Noble OBE FRS FREng is the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME), University of Oxford.
Professor Noble’s academic research interests are in computational (machine-learning based) analysis of medical images and video with her group best known for its research on ultrasound imaging applications to meet clinical unmet needs in western and low-and-middle-income countries healthcare settings. Prof. Noble received the Royal Society Gabor Medal for her inter-disciplinary research contributions in 2019, and the same year received the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) Society Enduring Impact award. Alison co-founded Intelligent Ultrasound Ltd to commercial research from her laboratory which was acquired by MedaPhor Group Plc in 2017 (now called Intelligent Ultrasound Group).
Professor Noble is a former president of the MICCAI Society, the international society in her field. She was a member of the UK REF 2021 Subpanel 12 (Engineering). Alison has served on a number of UKRI (EPSRC and MRC) advisory committees, including Chair of the EPSRC Healthcare Technologies Strategic Advisory Team and recently joined the EPSRC Science, Engineering and Technology Board. Professor Noble is an active Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Society, an ELLIS Fellow, a Fellow of the MICCAI Society, and a former Trustee of the Institute of Engineering Technology (IET). She chairs the Royal Society Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Policy Working Group which led to the Royal Society “Protecting privacy in practice” policy report in 2019 which will publish follow-on work in Summer 2022. Alison received an OBE for services to science and engineering in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2013.
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS FREng FBCS is Principal of Jesus College and Professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford.
He completed his undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Newcastle, graduating with 1st Class Honours in 1978. His postgraduate studies were in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham, where he established and led the AI Research Group. In 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems.
In 2000 he moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. His research focused on the science and engineering needed to support the continued development of the World Wide Web and he led the Web and Internet Science Group. In 2009 he was appointed, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as Information Advisor to the UK Government. This work led to the release of many thousands of public sector data sets as open data. In 2010 he was appointed by the Coalition Government to the UK Public Sector Transparency Board, which oversaw the continued release of Government open data. He continues to advise Government in a number of roles. He is Chairman and Co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), based in Shoreditch, London. The ODI specialised in the exploitation of Open Data supporting innovation, training and research in both the UK and internationally.
He has always been fascinated by the link between innovation and research. He was a founder and Chief Technology Officer of ID protection company Garlik Ltd. In 2008, Garlik was awarded Technology Pioneer status by the Davos World Economic Forum and won the UK national BT Flagship IT Award. In December 2011 Garlik was acquired by Experian Ltd. In its 50th Anniversary year 2006-2007, he was President of the British Computer Society. He am a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
He has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. He was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science that seeks to understand the Web at a systems level. As well as open data, his current research focusses on the concept of ‘social machines’. Working with the universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, he is researching the theory and practice of social machines – applications that succeed at Web scale by integrating humans and computers in novel and unanticipated ways.
He has published over 500 articles, and since 2000 has acted as principal or co-investigator on 30 research projects.
Chaired by
Professor John Tasioulas, the inaugural Director for the Institute for Ethics and AI, and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He was previously the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy & Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy & Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, Kings College London. Professor Tasioulas has degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a D.Phil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He was previously a Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow, Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1998-2010, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. He has also acted as a consultant on human rights for the World Bank and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the European Parliament's Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA). He has published widely in moral, legal, and political philosophy.