Invited Talk

"Responsible AI: from Principles to Action"
Virginia Dignum


Every day we see news about advances and the societal impact of AI. AI is changing the way we work, live and solve challenges but concerns about fairness, transparency or privacy are also growing. Ensuring AI ethics is more than designing systems whose result can be trusted. It is about the way we design them, why we design them, and who is involved in designing them. In order to develop and use AI responsibly, we need to work towards technical, societal, institutional and legal methods and tools which provide concrete support to AI practitioners, as well as awareness and training to enable participation of all, to ensure the alignment of AI systems with our societies' principles and values.

Short bio:

Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden and associated with the TU Delft in the Netherlands. She is the director of WASP-HS, the Wallenberg Program on Humanities and Society for AI, Autonomous Systems and Software, the largest Swedish national research program on fundamental multidisciplinary research on the societal and human impact of AI.

She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). Her current research focus is on the specification, verification and monitoring of ethical and societal principles for intelligent autonomous systems. She is committed to policy and awareness efforts towards the responsible development and use of AI, as member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the World Economic Forum’s Global Artificial Intelligence Council, lead for UNICEF's guidance for AI and children, the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design, and as founding member of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance.

Her book “Responsible Artificial Intelligence: developing and using AI in a responsible way” was published by Springer-Nature in 2019. She studied at the university of Lisbon and the Free University of Amsterdam and has a PHD in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University in 2004.