Dr. Francesca Rossi of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

AI is going to bring huge benefits in terms of scientific progress, human wellbeing, economic value, and the possibility of finding solutions to major social and environmental problems. Supported by AI, we will be able to make more grounded decisions and to focus on the main values and goals of a decision process rather than on routine and repetitive tasks. However, such a powerful technology also raises some concerns, related for example to the black-box nature of some AI approaches, the possible discriminatory decisions that AI algorithms may recommend, and the accountability and responsibility when an AI system is involved in an undesirable outcome. Also, since many successful AI techniques rely on huge amounts of data, it is important to know how data are handled by AI systems and by those who produce them.

As AI's capabilities evolve, from machine learning to generative AI to agentic AI, these concerns are evolving as well, and are among the obstacles that hold AI back or that cause worry for current AI users, adopters, and policy makers. Without adequate and convincing answers to these questions, many will not trust AI, and therefore will not fully adopt it nor get its positive impact.

In this talk I will present the main issues around AI ethics, showing how they have evolved over time, and some of the proposed technical and non-technical solutions, as well as practical actions and regulations being defined for AI development, deployment, and use. I will also describe how IBM has been addressing these issues with a company-wide multi-stakeholder and risk-based approach.

Biography:

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader.

She is based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA. Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, with special focus on constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, neuro-symbolic AI, cognitive architectures, and value alignment. On these topics, she has published over 220 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters.

She is a Fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI) and the European one (EurAI). She has been president of IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) and of AAAI.

She has a long and deep experience in AI governance and best practices for corporate AI ethics and risk assessment.

She is a member of the board of the Partnership on AI and she co-chairs the Responsible AI working group of the Global Partnership on AI. She also co-chairs the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures and she has been a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI, that led to the European AI Act.

At IBM, she leads AI research projects and she co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board, which provides the coordinated governance around all AI ethics activities for the whole company. Some of the assets that the board provides include an internal use case AI risk assessment process, several software tools, education material, developers’ playbooks, and AI risk analysis documents such as the recently published ones on generative Ai and agentic AI.