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Panelists:

• Houssam Abbas, Assistant Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Margaret Burnett, Distinguished Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Fuxin Li, Associate Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Alicia Patterson, Assistant Professor, School of History, Philosophy and Religion

Moderator: Prasad Tadepalli, Director of AI Program, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

What is the panel about?

The topic of the panel is deliberately ambiguous. One the one hand, it is about how to conduct AI research ethically, e.g., in a way that respects the rights of other people, causes no harm, and contributes to human welfare. On the other hand, it is also about researching techniques to build “Ethical AI.” Here, the “AI” takes some of the ethical responsibility, but the research community is responsible to make sure that the AI they build is ethical and respects human values. The first version is common to other kinds of research, e.g., building nuclear plants and curing cancer. The second version is unique to AI, because AI can apparently reason about causes, effects, values and norms in a way that nuclear plants and cancer drugs cannot. The panelists explore the questions around both of these aspects with implications to economic prosperity, public policy, and human flourishing in the long term.

Prasad Tadepalli is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and directs the AI graduate program at Oregon State University. He has published over 150 papers in AI. His interests include Explainable AI, Machine Learning, and AI for Agriculture.

Houssam Abbas is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. His research interests include formal ethical theories for autonomous agents, with particular emphasis on unpiloted ground and aerial vehicles. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2022, and participated in the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of the National Academies of Engineering in 2022.

Margaret Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor in the School of EECS at Oregon State University. She has done seminal work in the area of Explainable AI (XAI) and is currently working on how to improve the inclusivity of human-AI user experiences. She is an ACM Fellow, and was elected to ACM's CHI Academy in 2016 as one of the "principal leaders of the field" of HCI. In 2023, she became a member of the Steering Committee of the Academic Alliance on AI Policy (AAAIP).

Fuxin Li is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. He has held research positions at Apple Inc., University of Bonn and Georgia Institute of Technology. He has won an NSF CAREER award and an Amazon Research Award, among other accolades. He has published more than 90 papers in computer vision, machine learning, as well as applications of machine learning and computer vision.

Alicia Patterson is the Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at OSU. Her research focuses on the ethics of emerging technology, with a special interest in privacy and data ethics. Prior to OSU, Patterson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics Lab at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, she worked on developing an ethics curriculum for computer science classes.