Founder + Director
Cansu is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab, one of the first initiatives focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on AI ethics. She is also the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and a Research Associate Professor in Philosophy at Northeastern University, with affiliations with the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. With her team of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars, she provides hands-on, research based consulting in integrating ethics analyses into AI innovation and implementing responsible AI governance and strategy for organizations.
Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. Cansu serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards and as an ethics advisor to Fortune 500 companies. She works with World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance in developing guidelines and best practices for “Responsible AI Application and Transformation” and “Responsible AI Stewardship for Investors”. She co-designed and co-developed the “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement” for UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL, serving as their AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant.
Cansu primarily works on ethics of technology, having previously worked extensively on ethics and health. Prior to AI Ethics Lab, she was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization. Among others, she is also a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), serves as an ethics expert for EU and NIH funded research projects, chairs the IEEE AI Ethics Experts Network Criteria Committee and Northeastern’s IRB. A two-time TEDx speaker, Cansu has given over 100 talks on AI ethics, including keynotes at Harvard Business School, the U.S. Department of Justice, her TEDxCambridge talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles, and several others. She was listed among the “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston” and the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics”, nominated for the VentureBeat’s “Women in AI” award and AIMed’s “AI Champions in Healthcare” award, and recognized with Mozilla’s Rise25 “Change Agent” award. She is also the first technology and AI ethicist in Turkey.
For more detailed information, you can download her CV or contact her at cansu@aiethicslab.com.
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Selected Talks:
Responsible AI in Games | European Conference on AI | Krakow, September 2023
Why Building a Responsible AI Practice is Necessary for the Enterprise of the Future | BostonCIO | Portland, July 2023
The Box: Operationalizing AI Ethics Principles | ODSC East | Boston, May 2023
Responsible Use of AI in Law Enforcement | Crime Fighters Conference | Miami, February 2023
Sparks Forum! | CERN | Geneva, September 2021 & November 2022
An Ethics Model for Innovation: The PiE Model | NYU & TUM – AI Ethics: Global Perspectives | Online, June 2022
Building Technology Responsibly | Deloitte Tech Intercepts | Online, March 2022
Applying Ethics to AI Technologies | MIT Sloan Business School | January 2020 & 2021 & 2022
Ethics of AI Research: Implementation & Implications | PRIM&R 2021 Advancing Ethical Research Conference | Online, November 2021
Ethical & Legal Considerations for Research Involving AI | U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services | Online, July 2021
AI Ethics & Governance | Iron Mountain, Executive Exchange | Online, June 2021
Leveraging New Technologies for Peace | UN Innovation Cell & Antalya Diplomacy Forum | Online, May 2021
Creating Ethical Online Content | Nanyang Technical University (Singapore) | Online, November 2020
The Role of AI in Post-Pandemic Era | Harvard Global Health Institute + MIT Critical Data + Novartis Foundation | Online, July 2020
Artificial Intelligence & Human Subject Protection | CITI Program | Online, May 2020
How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles | TEDxCambridge | Boston, November 2019
A Practical Guide to Integrating AI Ethics | MIT Technology Review | Singapore, November 2019
IRBs for AI: An Unintelligent Choice | University of Oxford, Future of Humanity Institute | Oxford, November 2019
AI, Ethics, and Public Safety | U.S. Department of Justice | Memphis, September 2019
Law, Ethics, and AI | Harvard Law School | Cambridge, April 2019
Integrating Ethics into AI Research & Development | Harvard Business School | Boston, February 2019
For the full list, see the CV.
For further information and booking, please see Cansu’s WSB page.
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Selected Writings:
AI and Governance in Defence Innovation: Implementing an AI Ethics Framework | The AI Wave in Defence Innovation (Routledge), 2023
Ethical and Legal Aspects of Data Science for Large Scale Human Mobility | Data Science for Migration and Mobility (Oxford Press), 2022
Did You Find It on the Internet? Ethical Complexities of Search Engine Rankings | Perspectives on Digital Humanism (Springer), 2021
Operationalizing AI Ethics Principles | Communications of the ACM, 2020
AI and Ethics in Human Subject Research | CITI Program, 2020
Why ‘Mandatory Privacy-Preserving Digital Contact Tracing’ is the Ethical Measure against COVID-19 | Medium, 2020
Human Rights & AI Ethics – Why Ethics Cannot be Replaced by the UDHR | United Nations University, Centre for Policy Research, 2019
A New Model for AI Ethics in R&D | Forbes AI, 2019
A User-Focused Transdisciplinary Research Agenda for AI-Enabled Health Tech Governance | Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 2019
Machine Learning as the Enemy of Science? Not Really. | Harvard Law School, Bill of Health, 2018
Voice Assistants, Health, and Ethical Design | Harvard Law School, Bill of Health, 2017
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