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27 Jan 2022 / 17:30 - 18:15
Challenges and Opportunities of AI Technologies: The Role of AI Ethics in Business
This masterclass will focus on how to bridge the gaps between the tech community researching, designing and developing AI technologies, the businesses implementing or deploying AI technologies, and the ethical concerns around the research, design, development, deployment and use of AI technologies.
There will be some brief discussion on technical approaches to alleviate ethical concerns, but the focus will be on the role of business executives and managers in ensuring ethical AI involvement across applications in their businesses, as well as how to concretise the abstract values driving consideration of ethical concerns in terms of the day-to-day working of a business.

Emma Ruttkamp Bloem,
University Of Pretoria
Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem is head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria.
She is the coordinator of the Ethics of AI Research Group at the Centre for AI Research (CAIR) in South Africa, and co-chair of the Steering Committee for the Southern African Conference for AI Research (SACAIR). Prof Ruttkamp-Bloem is a member of the African Union Development Agency Consultative Roundtable on Ethics in Africa and a current member of the UNESCO World Commission for Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. She chaired the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group that prepared an initial draft of a Recommendation for a global instrument on the ethics of AI in 2020. She is the South African representative at the Responsible AI Network Africa. She is a member of various advisory boards such as that the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Programme (Human Sciences) hosted by Umeå University in Sweden. She has a PhD in Philosophy in the domains of mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. Currently, in AI ethics, she works in machine ethics, the ethics of social robotics, data ethics and the philosophy of human-technology relations. In terms of policy making, she focuses on generating culturally sensitive policies for trustworthy AI technologies while aiming for global regulation. In the philosophy of science, her work is centred on debates in scientific realism, the structure of scientific theories, and the status of machine learning-based methodologies in the discovery/justification debate. She has been the South African representative at the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST) since 2014. She is a member of the editorial board of Springer’s Synthese Library Book Series, the editorial board of Acta Baltica: Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum and she is an associate editor of Science and Engineering Ethics.