Guest Lecture: Ethically bounded AI

Otaniemi TUAS-building, Maarintie 8, Espoo (Aalto University)
Tiistai, 9. Lokakuu 2018 - 17:00 - 18:30

Welcome to hear and discuss about ”Ethically bounded AI” with Professor Francesca Rossi from IBM research. The event is free of charge and open to all interested in the leading research, policy discussions and practical questions on AI Ethics.


About the speaker


Francesca Rossi is the AI Ethics Global Leader, Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research and Professor of Computer Science at University of Padova (currently on leave). She has worked for three decades in Artificial Intelligence in Europe and in the United States.


Organizers: Teknologiateollisuus and FCAI (Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence )


Antti ”Jogi” Poikola, Teknologiateollisuus

Co-lead of the Finnish AI Accelerator

+358 44 337 5439

The lecture will be followed by moment of networking with snacks!

Further information on the lecture and speaker:

The more AI agents are deployed in scenarios with possibly unexpected situations, the more they need to be flexible, adaptive, and creative in achieving the goal we have given them. So, a certain level of freedom to choose the best path to the goal is inherent in making AI robust and flexible enough for the real-world. 

At the same time, however, the pervasive deployment of AI in our life, whether AI is autonomous or collaborating with humans, raises several ethical challenges. AI agents should be aware of and follow appropriate ethical principles and should thus exhibit properties such as fairness or other virtues. These ethical principles should define the boundaries of AI’s freedom and creativity. 

In this talk I will introduce the notion of ethically bounded AI, showing several examples where the absence of such boundaries led to undesired paths to achieve the given goal. I will then outline the main approaches to model and embed ethical principles in AI agents, describing some existing developments to achieve ethically bounded AI, using a combination of data-driven, knowledge-based, symbolic, and logic-based approaches. 

I will then propose a way to generalize and move forward from the current approaches, describing a vision of future ethically bounded AI that can also help humans identify and follow the appropriate ethical boundaries for them. 

I will finish the talk by addressing meta-issues such as the identification of the suitable values to embed into ethical AI, the possible difference between human and AI ethics, the cultural differences around AI ethics, and the role of scientific associations in helping societies and corporations to build ethically bounded AI. 


Francesca Rossi is the AI Ethics Global Leader, Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research AI and professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, currently on leave.

Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behaviour of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. She has published over 190 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters. She has co-authored a book. She has edited 17 volumes, between conference proceedings, collections of contributions, special issues of journals, as well as the Handbook of Constraint Programming.   

She is a AAAI and a EurAI fellow, and a Radcliffe fellow 2015. She has been president of IJCAI and an executive councillor of AAAI. She is Editor in Chief of JAIR and a member of the editorial board of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, AMAI, and KAIS. She co-chairs the AAAI committee on AI and ethics and she is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute and of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she belongs to the World Economic Forum Council on AI and robotics. She is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI, where she represents IBM as one of the founding partners.