Digital Catapult Ethics Committee

Digital Catapult Ethics Committee Chair, Turing Fellow and Chair of the Data Ethics Group, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute, and is Professorial Fellow of Exeter College. He is also Turing Fellow and Chair of the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute. His areas of expertise include digital ethics, the philosophy of information, and the philosophy of technology. Among his recent books, all are published by Oxford University Press: The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), winner of the J. Ong Award; The Ethics of Information (2013); The Philosophy of Information (2011); The Logic of Information (forthcoming in 2019).

Sir William (Bill) Blair is Professor of Financial Law and Ethics at Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for Commercial Law Studies. He is a former senior judge, now an arbitrator at barristers’ Chambers at 3 Verulam Buildings, London, and holds appointments at the EU level and at the Bank of England. His interests lie in the field of fintech, and how AI may help, for example, in addressing the problem of financial exclusion.

Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Pro Vice-Chancellor (International Engagement) at the University of Southampton, and is the Executive Director of the Web Science Institute. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006 and is the Managing Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She has previously been President of the ACM, Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, was a founding member of the European Research Council and Chair of the European Commission’s ISTAG 2010-2012, and was a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She is currently a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Digital Economy, and is co-Chair of the UK government’s AI Review, which was published in October 2017.

Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser at Open Data Institute

Jeni Tennison is the Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser of the Open Data Institute. She gained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, then worked as an independent consultant specialising in open data publishing and consumption. She was the Technical Architect and Lead Developer for legislation.gov.uk before joining the ODI as Technical Director in 2012, becoming CEO in 2016. in 2021, she became Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser.

Jeni sits on the UK’s Open Standards Board; the Advisory Board for the Open Contracting Partnership; the Board of Ada, the UK’s National College for Digital Skills; the Co-operative’s Digital Advisory Board; and the Board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

Chief Executive Officer at UKIE – The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment

Jo Twist is CEO of Ukie, the trade body for UK games and interactive entertainment, making the UK the best place in the world to make, sell and play games. She is also Deputy Chair of the British Screen Advisory Council, London Tech Ambassador, Chair of the BAFTA Games Committee, an Ambassador on the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board, and Creative Industries Council member. In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for services to the creative industries and won the MCV 30 Women in Games award for Outstanding Contribution. She is a Vice President for games and accessibility charity, SpecialEffect and the government’s Sector Champion for Disabilities. Previously, Jo was Education Commissioning Editor for Channel 4 where she commissioned Digital Emmy-winning Battlefront II, free to play browser and iOS games and social media projects. Jo was Multiplatform Commissioner for BBC Entertainment & Switch, BBC Three Multiplatform Channel Editor, and technology reporter for BBC News. Her doctorate in the late 1990s was an ethnography exploring identity and concepts of difference in place based and virtual communities.

Senior Policy Advisor, Royal Academy of Engineering

Dr Philippa Westbury is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Royal Academy of Engineering, which brings together the UK’s leading engineers and technologists for a shared purpose: to promote engineering excellence for the benefit of society. She leads the Academy’s digital and data policy work, and works on other aspects of engineering policy, such as infrastructure and built environment, manufacturing and decarbonisation in which digital and data play increasingly important roles. Prior to this, she worked in the built environment sector in policy, consultancy and research roles. She has engineering degrees from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

Elisabeth Ling is a Product Management and Data Science Leader. Elisabeth is an expert in developing digital products and leading teams in startups, scaleups and global companies. She holds over 20+ years experience in the digital industry, including six years at PayPal and eBay. Elisabeth also worked for five years at RELX Group where she was SVP and Managing Director, Data Science, Analytics and Product Management for Elsevier Researcher Products. In 2019-20, she was a member of the High-Level Expert Group on AI and Ethics for the European Commission. Her interests include digital product management, data science, responsible and ethical innovation, with a focus on the ethics of artificial intelligence. In parallel, she is Board Director of COUNTER, a body that enables the knowledge community to measure the use of electronic resources. Elisabeth is also Product CEO Advisor at Ometria, a customer insight and marketing platform dedicated to retailers. She holds an Applied Mathematics MSc from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ParisTech) and an MA Marketing from ESSEC Business School.

Jonathan Drori has particular interests in good governance and public uses of technology. He is a Trustee of The Eden Project, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Cambridge Science Centre. Previously he was Trustee of the Internet Watch Foundation and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Chairman of Ravensbourne University London. Jon was Head of Commissioning for BBC Online, and at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) he was founding Director of Culture Online, a successful programme to bring culture and the arts to new audiences using new technologies. As a Visiting Industrial Professor at Bristol University, Jon specialised in science misconceptions and is presently an angel investor in socially responsible startups.

Peter has twenty five years experience working in the private and third sectors in a number of policy and delivery roles. Most recently he was Director of Public Policy at the Open Data Institute where he worked on data infrastructure, digital competition, data ethics, data trusts, and other institutions. In 2014 he worked in a voluntary role to run an independent review of digital government for the UK Labour Party. Previously he spent 20 years working with telecoms operators in multiple European countries helping them to build new businesses and new services. He believes in a world where data and technology works for everyone, and is a big fan of books, Blackpool FC and being by the seaside.

Isabel’s experience spans the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds and has focussed on roles at the interface of business and Technology. Most recently she brought a start-up, commercial perspective to the major technology innovator, Ocado, where she held a number of broad senior leadership roles. These included establishing creative ways to trial new technology, running Product Management and most recently leading operational and organisational elements of the business as Head of UK Development Centres. Isabel is strongly committed to influencing the responsible adoption of AI and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in AI Ethics and Society run by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Research Fellow, Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford
Junior research fellow, Jesus College, Oxford

Carina Prunkl studied Philosophy and Physics at the University of Oxford and Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to her work at the Institute for Ethics in AI she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. Her main interest is the interaction between ethics and governance and the question of how we can effectively implement ethical considerations into governance solutions.

Zachary J. Goldberg is Ethics Innovation Manager at Trilateral Research. He currently leads work to promote ethical innovations in technical development focusing on explainable, ethical and responsible AI, ethics by design, as well as the ethical, privacy and societal assessment of artificially intelligent and automated systems. His most recent work focuses on ethical AI in the contexts of human security, policing, predictive risk assessments, education, and biometric identity verification. In addition, his research background and areas of expertise are in applied ethics and moral, political, and social philosophy, and is the author of 18 peer-reviewed articles, a monograph and editor of two books in these areas. He holds a PhD in moral philosophy and completed postdoctoral fellowships (incl. the German Habilitation) in applied ethics and moral philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the University of Regensburg.

Sam Brown is a business coach and co-founder of Consequential, a social innovation practice focused on disruption for the common good and specialising in responsible business strategy and culture, change management, and communications. Sam led the programme on responsible innovation at Doteveryone - a responsible technology think tank - creating consequence scanning and contributing to research such as ‘People, Power and Technology: The Tech Worker’s View’. Prior to that, she was a senior business partner in financial technology, supporting transformations from waterfall to agile and collaborating with executives and product teams to deliver award-winning online experiences.

Founder and CEO of AI strategic advisory firm Anekanta Consulting where her focus is on the research, development and ethical application of AI and disruptive technology across a number of sectors including; civil security/video surveillance, transportation, retail, manufacturing, critical national infrastructure and smart cities. Prior to this role, she acquired over 20 years specialised security industry experience through senior board positions in a number of international technology businesses specialised in the field of video surveillance and analytics. Alongside her current activities, Pauline is a strategic advisor to the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) on AI and Automated Facial Recognition policy. She has worked voluntarily with the Association for over 20 years during which time she held the position of Chair of the Board for a two year term in 2014.

Professor of Search & Analytics, Information School, University of Sheffield, UK

Head of Data Science, Peak Indicators, UK

Paul works part-time as Professor of Search and Analytics at the Information School, University of Sheffield. During his time in the department, as well as contributing to research and teaching activities, Paul has been head of the Information Retrieval Group, Director of Research, and coordinator of the MSc Data Science programme. Paul conducts research in areas including AI and Data Science, Information Retrieval, Data Analytics and Natural Language Processing.

CEO And Founder, Beyond Reach Consulting Ltd

Known as Trish (she/her) is CEO And Founder, Beyond Reach Consulting Ltd – a digital ethics consultancy. Trish has 20 years’ experience as a lawyer in technology, regulatory and government affairs. Trish’s expertise is in data, financial services, public sector (Health- and EdTech), and smart cities. Through her consultancy, Trish supports businesses to deliver ‘ethics by design’ across the whole AI lifecycle to build trust with customers, industry, and wider society and to develop organisational capability, competence, and culture internally.

Mavis Machirori is a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, leading on the Health and Covid19 Technologies programme. Her work interrogates data-driven and genomic technologies, legacies on society and their impacts on health and social inequalities. Mavis has extensive clinical background in midwifery and social research expertise, with experience drawing on a range of disciplines such as medical anthropology and sociology. Mavis was previously a member of the World Economic Forum Future Council on Biotechnology and is a current Visiting Researcher at Newcastle University’s Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre.

Aparna is on a mission to empower technologists to build digital infrastructure that is primed to deliver equitable benefits and sidestep unintended, known harms. A technology anthropologist, service designer and AI ethics researcher, Aparna approaches digital ethics from the human side of technology. She translates complex digital ethics challenges and makes them actionable with diverse audiences - be it an Ethics Sprint workshop for 120 technologists or consulting with public sector stakeholders at the UK Government.

Research Associate at Centre for the study of Existential Risk (CSER)

Shahar Avin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He works with CSER researchers and others in the global catastrophic risk community to identify and design risk prevention strategies, through organising workshops, building agent-based models, and by frequently asking naive questions. Prior to CSER, Shahar worked at Google for a year as a mobile/web software engineer. His PhD was in Philosophy of Science, on the allocation of public funds to research projects. His undergrad was in Physics and Philosophy of Science, which followed a mandatory service in the IDF. He has also worked at and with several startups over the years.

Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford

Carissa Véliz is a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford. She did her DPhil on the ethics and politics of privacy at the University of Oxford. She works on digital ethics, moral and political philosophy, and public policy. She is the author of Privacy Is Power (Transworld, forthcoming), and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics (forthcoming).

Professor of computational legal theory at University of Edinburgh

Burkhard Schafer studied Theory of Science, Logic, Theoretical Linguistics, Philosophy and Law at the Universities of Mainz, Munich, Florence and Lancaster. His main field of interest is the interaction between law, science and computer technology, especially computer linguistics. How can law, understood as a system, communicate with systems external to it – be it the law of other countries (comparative law and its methodology) or science (evidence, proof and trial process)? As a co-founder and co-director of the Joseph Bell Centre for Legal Reasoning and Forensic Statistics, I help to develop new approaches to assist lawyers in evaluating scientific evidence and develop computer models which embody these techniques. A special interest here is the development of computer systems that help law enforcement agencies to co-operate more efficiently across jurisdictions, assisting them in the interpretation of the legal environment within which evidence in other jurisdictions is collected. This research is linked to his wider interest in comparative law and its methodology, the idea of a “Chomsky turn in comparative law”, and the project of a “computational legal theory.

Entrepreneur in Residence at Cambridge Computer Lab

Laura James works with emerging technologies in new and growing organisations across sectors, and has been active in the tech responsibility space since 2016, with a focus on practical ways to improve industry practice. Working with businesses and learning about their technologies, challenges and opportunities has always been fascinating to her, and she enjoys supporting early stage and growing organisations. Laura is looking forward to helping the Machine Intelligence Garage startups act responsibly as regards their users, society more broadly, and other stakeholders, as well as exploring the tradeoffs and choices they face.

Research Associate and Doctoral Candidate at the Technical University in Munich

Christina has been researching digital ethics, privacy, and data protection in her work for more than 3 years. Her interests lie in understanding the ethical implications of new technologies and innovation and in studying how these can be managed through responsible innovation, law, and policy. Christina has worked on various topics, including explaining AI decision-making, the ethics of machine learning research in children’s social care, and the ethics and privacy implications of civil drone use and cybercrime law enforcement investigations.

Christina has experience working with international research teams to apply ethics-by-design and privacy-by-design and continues to investigate how to carry out responsible scientific research and innovation. Christina has a Master of Law from the University of Zurich and the Catholic University of Leuven, where she focused her studies on International and European Law and wrote her Master’s thesis about data protection, surveillance and the EU-US international data flows. Building on this, Christina has gained experience in a diverse set of fields, including international relations and human rights and was a graduate trainee with the Legal Service of the European Commission.

Senior Technical Healthcare Business Analyst at London’s Air Ambulance Charity

Dr Christine Henry is working as Senior Technical Healthcare Business Analyst at London’s Air Ambulance Charity. She previously worked as a Product Manager at Amnesty International on Amnesty Decoders, an online volunteering platform, and at IQVIA as a Product Manager on a healthcare platform to explore and analyse patient data. Christine has over eight years of experience in healthcare data analysis, forecasting, and market access, as well as knowledge of machine learning and data science. She holds a PhD in physical chemistry from the Australian National University, and a law degree. Christine is passionate about investigating the ethical and social impacts of new technologies and data. She is a volunteer at DataKind UK, where she works with teams of pro bono data scientists to help charities and nonprofits to use data science techniques to have a greater impact. She led the development of DataKind UK’s ethical principles for data science volunteers and has presented on this work at conferences and meetings.

Data Ethics Researcher at The Alan Turing Institute

Josh Cowls researches the ethics and politics of data science and AI at the Alan Turing Institute in London. Josh is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. While at the Turing, Josh has helped launch its Ethics Advisory Group to ensure that the research conducted at the Institute is ethically sound, and has also contributed to the creation of the Ada Lovelace Institute, in partnership with the Nuffield Foundation. Josh’s research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, politics and communication, and his forthcoming PhD will explore the legitimacy of algorithmic decision-making in society.

Operations & Commercial Director, SynbiCITE, Imperial College

John is Operations & Commercial Director at Imperial College’s national Synthetic Biology facility, SynbiCITE. He has a wealth of experience in the science and technology startup world & is very active in the sector, particularly in entrepreneurship training with business startup to amplifying scaleup. SynbiCITE is a national centre for any spin-out, startup or business with technology involving synthetic biology – the engineering of biology – connecting multiple centres of excellence across the UK & is located in Imperial College London with shared wet-lab facilities, technical support, business support and funding. He is also a Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, teaching the IP for Entrepreneurship Elective for their Master’s programmes.

Fellow and College Teaching Officer, King’s College, Cambridge

Maurice Chiodo is a research mathematician, working as a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge. He is the co-founder and lead investigator of the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Project, looking at ethical issues that arise in mathematical work, and generating material to help teach the mathematically trained how to foresee and avert such problems. Maurice lectures on Ethics in Mathematics in the faculty of mathematics at Cambridge; one of the few such courses in the world. He holds two PhDs in mathematics, which addressed computable problems in algebra, focusing on how small amounts of additional information can turn problems from being incomputable to solvable. Maurice’s current research aims to develop and promote ethical awareness among those who use mathematics in society.

Chair of Design Engineering and Director of Research, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London

Rafael Calvo is Chair of Design Engineering and Director of Research at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. He joined in July 2019 after being Professor at the University of Sydney, and Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Calvo has published 3 books and over 200 papers on computational intelligence and its applications to health and education. He has taught at several Universities, high schools and professional training institutions. He worked at the Language Technology Institute in Carnegie Mellon University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and on sabbaticals at the University of Cambridge and the University of Memphis. Rafael is Co-Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society and was Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. in Affective Computing and IEEE Trans in Learning Technologies. Rafael is Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing and co-author of “Positive Computing” (MIT Press). Calvo is member of the Ethics Committee of the Machine Intelligence Garage at Digital Catapult, acting in an independent capacity, via Imperial Consultants.