Cansu Canca

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that global scale health crises require going beyond traditional public health measures. Technology holds great potential in helping us scale up the efforts to collectively fight a health crisis. But harvesting this potential should not, and need not, come with ethical violations. In this talk, Canca demonstrates how to combine ethical reasoning, design thinking, and policy decisions to develop timely and ethical tech responses to health crises.

AI systems are becoming an indispensable part of health and healthcare. They assist physicians with treatment choices, risk analyses, and prevention of complex and sudden health events. Individuals also use AI systems to track their well-being and make healthy lifestyle choices. As these tools become more integrated into health and healthcare decisions, their ethics risks increase. In this talk, Canca draws from her extensive experience in the intersection of ethics, health, and technology to explain various types of ethics risks and how to navigate them.

AI systems have become a part of our everyday lives, often with welcomed convenience, efficiency, and fun. They sort information for us and assist us in decision-making. As we learn to use and live with these AI systems, we often overlook that they also structure our worldview and even decide for us. In this talk, we look at how AI systems affect our choices and how we can design, develop, and use these tools to enhance our decision-making rather than limiting it.

Around the world, various organizations have announced their AI principles. Canca draws on AI Ethics Lab’s research on the global landscape of AI principles, unwraps the common threads and common shortcomings of these principles, and demonstrate how they can be transformed into operational and guiding steps.

AI technologies bring novel ethics risks for companies developing or using these systems. Effectively navigating these risks requires integrating an AI ethics strategy into the company and approaching ethics questions as puzzles to be solved rather than merely applying a set of standardized rules. This talk is focused on how to systematize this ethical puzzle-solving horizontally throughout the innovation process and vertically throughout the organizational structure.

From facial recognition tools for suspect identification to pattern recognition for financial crime, AI technologies can help law enforcement fight crime more efficiently. But what about ethics? Not taking seriously concerns such as algorithmic bias and extensive surveillance risks creating further injustices and provoking a backlash that stifles even beneficial technologies. In this talk, Canca shows avenues for developing and adopting public safety technologies in ethically responsible ways.

History is rich with examples of individuals being mistreated in the name of research. The rules and regulations that developed in response, however, fail to provide comprehensive guidance on how to carry on AI research ethically. Canca draws from her extensive experience in research ethics and AI Ethics Lab’s work on ethics of AI research to re-examine traditional concepts like “consent” and “minimal harm” and integrate AI-specific concepts like “algorithmic bias” and “black box” into the research ethics framework.