Cansu Canca

From facial recognition systems for suspect identification to pattern analysis for detecting financial crimes, AI technologies are increasingly employed in law enforcement promising enhanced efficiency in crime prevention and investigation. However, the ethical implications of these technologies are profound, with concerns about algorithmic bias and extensive surveillance raising significant risks of injustice and potential public backlash. Drawing from her work with the UN and the INTERPOL, Canca will explore the critical ethical considerations associated with AI in policing and offer insights into how public safety technologies can be developed and implemented with a commitment to ethical responsibility and social justice.

As AI technologies become integral to health and healthcare, supporting physicians in clinical decision-making, risk assessment, and preventative care, and aiding individuals in monitoring their wellness and making health-conscious decisions, the ethical implications of these systems become increasingly critical. Canca leverages her extensive expertise at the intersection of ethics, health, and technology to elucidate the diverse ethical risks associated with AI in healthcare. You will gain a nuanced understanding of these risks and explore strategic approaches to effectively address and mitigate them, ensuring the responsible and ethical deployment of AI in the health sector.

AI technologies introduce complex ethical risks for organizations that develop or deploy these systems. Effectively navigating these challenges demands a comprehensive, clear, actionable, and dynamic responsible AI strategy that is tailored to the unique needs, priorities, and values of the organization. This talk will focus on the three foundational pillars of an effective responsible AI framework—process, playbook, and people—and provide insights into embedding ethical decision-making throughout the innovation lifecycle. Drawing from AI Ethics Lab’s extensive research on AI principles and governance, Canca will demonstrate how to translate high-level ethical objectives into tangible actions within design and development, ensuring that ethical considerations become integral to organizational practice.

In this talk, we will explore the growing importance of AI governance at the board level, focusing on the pivotal roles and responsibilities that executives must adopt to oversee ethical AI development. Canca will provide insights into the critical questions boards should ask to ensure AI strategies align with organizational values, mitigate risks, and promote long-term trust. By addressing these governance challenges, we aim to equip decision-makers with the strategic tools needed to guide responsible AI integration while driving sustained innovation and competitive advantage.

In this talk, we delve into the critical need for investing in AI technologies with a strategic emphasis on responsible AI practices. As AI governance and ethical AI strategies emerge as key risk factors for investors, the challenge lies in effectively evaluating potential investments for their exposure to these risks. Drawing on her work with the World Economic Forum, Canca will help you navigate the ethical dimensions inherent in AI-first investments, offering investors a framework for identifying and mitigating risks while fostering innovation. By adopting these strategies, decision-makers will be empowered to curate portfolios that not only optimize financial returns but also contribute to long-term societal benefit, ensuring both trust and sustainability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.