Inaugural academic team appointed to Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics in AI

John Tasioulas

Photo by Keiko Ikeuchi

A team of seven philosophers has been appointed as the first academic team for Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics in AI.

Professor John Tasioulas will become the inaugural Director of the Institute in October, joining from King’s College London where he is Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law.

The Institute was announced last June as part of a £150m gift from Stephen A. Schwarzman, who is Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s leading investment firms. It will be part of the Philosophy Faculty and based in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities at Oxford University.

The Institute aims to tackle major ethical challenges posed by AI, from face recognition to voter profiling, brain machine interfaces to weaponised drones, and the ongoing discourse about how AI will impact employment on a global scale. The Schwarzman Centre will house Oxford's Humanities disciplines together for the first time in the University’s history, and the Institute will benefit from collaboration with these disciplines.

The team will initially comprise:

  • The Director, Professor John Tasioulas, who will join as Director from King’s College London, where he is the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy & Law. He previously taught Moral and Legal Philosophy at Oxford for 12 years, has held visiting posts at Chicago, Harvard, and Melbourne, and has acted as a consultant on human rights for the World Bank.
  • An Associate Professor in Philosophy, Dr Carissa Véliz, who is currently Research Fellow at Oxford's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. She will become a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College.
  • An Associate Professor in Philosophy, Dr Milo Phillips-Brown, who will join from MIT where he is a Distinguished Fellow in Ethics and Technology. He is also Senior Research Fellow in Digital Ethics and Governance at the Jain Family Institute, and will become a Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College.
  • Two Postdoctoral Research Fellows, Dr Carina Prunkl and Dr Ted Lechterman, who will join as postdoctoral research fellows, from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, respectively.
  • Two doctoral students, who will start their programme in the coming academic year.

For more information, please visit the main University site.