Francesca Rossi

Distinguished Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Professor of computer science, University of Padova
USA/Italy

Francesca Rossi is a distinguished research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and a 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 behavior of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision-making. She has published over 170 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 has more than 100 co-authors.

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 Associate 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. 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 represents IBM on the board of the Partnership on AI.

She has given several media interviews about the future of AI and AI ethics (including to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Motherboard, Science, The Economist, CNBC, Eurovision, Corriere della Sera, and Repubblica) and she has delivered three TEDx talks on these topics.


Special Session: Social Impact of AI – future of AI and society, ethics
【Day 2-5】Safety and Benefits in the Long Term

Trusted AI for a beneficial partnership

AI is currently being deployed with great care about its accuracy and efficiency, while less effort is put into data handling and value alignment. This allows to have AI system that are very smart and exhibit few errors in the task they need to accomplish, but may give rise to undesired and unexpected behaviour which is not aligned to our values, or to biased decision making capabilities. In the long term, AI adoption will depend on being able to build trustworthy AI system. In this respect, explanation capabilities will be essential, as well as third party certifications of value alignment and unbiased behaviour.

【Day 2-6】Cooperating for Beneficial AI