Over the past five years, we’ve seen tremendous advances in the deployment of AI and cognitive computing technologies, ranging from useful consumer apps to transforming some of the world’s most complex industries, including healthcare, financial services, commerce, and the Internet of Things. This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century – one that will foster collaboration between people and machines to solve some of the world’s most enduring problems – in a way that is both trustworthy and beneficial.
Francesca Rossi is the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader, a distinguished research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, and a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy.
Francesca’s research interest focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues surrounding the development and behavior of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. A prolific author, Francesca has published over 190 scientific articles in both journals and conference proceedings as well as co-authoring A Short Introduction to Preferences: Between AI and Social Choice. She has edited 17 volumes, including conference proceedings, collections of contributions, special issues of journals, and The Handbook of Constraint Programming.
Francesca is both a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI fellow) and also a 2015 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. A prominent figure in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), at which she is a fellow, she has formerly served as an executive councilor of AAAI and currently co-chairs the association’s committee on AI and ethics. Francesca is an active voice in the AI community, serving as Associate Editor in Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and as a member of the editorial boards of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AMAI), and Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS). She is also a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute, sits on the executive committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)’s global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems, and belongs to the World Economic Forum Council on AI and robotics.