Founder + Director
Cansu is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab, where she leads teams of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars to provide ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. She is also the Ethics Lead and Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, co-leading their Responsible AI practice. Cansu serves as an AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant to the United Nations, working with UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL in building a “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement”. Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She primarily works on ethics of technology, having previously worked on ethics and health.
Cansu serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards. Among others, she is an ethics advisor to Fortune 500 companies, a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), serves as an ethics expert for EU-funded research projects, and chairs the IEEE AI Ethics Experts Network Criteria Committee.
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. 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”. She is also the first technology and AI ethicist in Turkey. She tweets @ccansu.
For more detailed information, you can download her CV or contact her at cansu@aiethicslab.com.
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Selected Talks:
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:
Did You Find It on the Internet? Ethical Complexities of Search Engine Rankings | Perspectives on Digital Humanism, 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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