ETHICS AND GOVERNANCE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial intelligence is everywhere, at times obscured and sometimes fully hidden, said Urs Gasser, the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Urs Gasser claims that AI will soon permeate the ways we interact with other people and with our governments, and that it will affect every aspect of human life.
He also underlines that AI can't be studied nor understood from a singular perspective as it requires a multidisciplinary approach. The division between computer scientists and engineers should be surpassed, such as the one between humanities, social sciences, ethics and policy making.
Nexa Center for ethics and governance of Artificial Intelligence
In accordance with Urs Gasser's approach, the Nexa Center will focus on AI in several ways, keeping together education, community building ,training, and outreach activities.
The first activities we will be involved on are:
Task Force on Artificial Intelligence for the PA
The Nexa Center will contribute to the work of a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, created and promoted by the Agency for Digital Italy, that will study how the dissemination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and technologies can affect the evolution of public services to improve the relationship between public administrations and citizens.
Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin is a member of the Coordination Board composed of thirty-people coming from the Academia, international organizations, market and start-ups.
In a few months, a white paper will be presented, containing suggestions and recommendations for the Italian public administration on how to adopt Artificial Intelligence solutions and technologies, in order to align itself to the international best practices.
PhD in Computer and Control Engineering: Data Ethics
Funded by Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
Supervised by Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin and Bruno Lepri.
PhD Student: Elena Beretta.
The Ph.D. project will focus on the ethics of data and on the ethics of algorithms.
The ethics of data focuses on ethical problems posed by the collection and analysis of large datasets and on issues ranging from the use of personal data in behavioral and biomedical research, to profiling and advertising. Here, key issues are the possible re‐identification of individuals and the risks of group discrimination (e.g. ageism, ethnicism, sexism).
The ethics of algorithms addresses issues posed by the increasing complexity and autonomy of algorithms broadly understood (e.g. predictive policing algorithms, credit scoring algorithms, and artificial agents such as Internet bots), especially in the case of machine learning applications.
In this case, some crucial challenges include moral responsibility and accountability of both designers and data scientists with respect to unforeseen and undesired consequences.
