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Coimbra Group Webinar: “AI Ethics and Governance”

30 January 2025

Thursday 13 March 2025, from 3 to 4.30 pm (CET)
with Francesca Rossi (IBM Fellow and IBM AI Ethics Global Leader)

The “AI Ethics and Governance” open webinar, organized by the Equality & Diversity Working Group with the support of the University of Padova, reflects the Coimbra Group’s strategic effort to explore the impact, opportunities, and challenges that AI presents to higher education. It is a key component of an ongoing process of strengthened collaboration among CG member universities on this issue, including the establishment of an AI Inter-Working Group in June 2024.

This seminar is one of several initiatives led by the Coimbra Group and its Working Groups to advance these discussions, introducing different perspectives and experts on the field. As a network, we are deeply committed to promoting innovation with well-being and social responsibility at its centre. These values remain at the core of our common vision in our AI.

The webinar is open and welcomes the free attendance of all interested persons. Registration to the webinar is free but registration through this online form is required in advance.

What is “AI Ethics and Governance” about?

AI is going to bring huge benefits in terms of scientific progress, human well-being, 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, the accountability and responsibility when an AI system is involved in an undesirable outcome, the spread of misinformation, and data privacy. These concerns are among the obstacles that hold AI back or that cause worry for current AI users, adopters, and policy makers.

Without satisfactory answers to these questions, many will not trust AI, and therefore will not fully adopt it nor get its positive impact. In this talk Francesca Rossi will present the main issues around AI ethics, how they relate to the AI capabilities, some of the proposed technical and non-technical solutions, including governance and regulations being defined for AI development, deployment, and use. She will also describe how IBM has been addressing these issues with a company-wide multi-stakeholder and risk-based approach.

About the keynote

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. After 25 years in academia, she is now based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA, where she leads research projects and she co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board.

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 AAAI and EurAI, and she has been the president of IJCAI. She is in the steering committee of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, that she chaired in 2023. She is the current president of AAAI. Besides her AI research activities, Francesca also work with many stakeholders on AI ethics and governance. She has been a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute and of the board of the Partnership on AI. She co-chairs the Responsible AI working group of the Global Partnership on AI and the OECD Expert group on AI Futures.