Dr. Atoosa Kasirzadeh has been appointed as a Chancellor’s Fellow in Philosophy, through the support of the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Centre for Technomoral Futures. Dr Kasirzadeh will work closely with Professor Shannon Vallor to develop and strengthen the Baillie Gifford research programme in ethics of data and artificial intelligence.

Dr Kasirzadeh comes to Edinburgh from the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Australian National University in their Humanising Machine Intelligence grand challenge project. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD) and will be awarded her second PhD from the University of Toronto (Philosophy of Science and Technology) in April this year.

Dr Kasirzadeh’s areas of research expertise are the philosophy, ethics, and politics of AI and computing; the role of mathematics in empirical sciences and normative inquiry; and the implications of mathematical and computational modelling in the social world. She was selected as one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021.

Commenting on her appointment, Dr. Kasirzadeh said:

“I am thrilled to join the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Centre for Technomoral Futures, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. In this extremely stimulating environment, I look forward to contributing, in various ways, to the incorporation of philosophical and moral thinking into the design of technological ecosystems”

As a Chancellor’s Fellow for the Centre for Technomoral Futures and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, her innovative interdisciplinary research at the intersections of philosophy, computing and machine learning will expand and deepen the Baillie Gifford Research Programme in Data and AI Ethics. Her work will help also to shape an innovative new undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum in data ethics at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

“Dr. Kasirzadeh’s appointment as Chancellor’s Fellow is a major milestone for the Centre for Technomoral Futures in EFI and our Baillie Gifford Research Programme in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence. She brings to the Centre and to the Philosophy Department at Edinburgh an exceptional and vital synthesis of expertise in mathematics, computing, ethics, and the history and philosophy of science and technology. This appointment greatly furthers the Centre’s mission to unify technical and moral modes of future-building expertise in new models of research, education, and public engagement that directly serve the goals of sustainable, just and ethical innovation”.

—Professor Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute