CANSU CANCA
Dr. Cansu Canca is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab, a pioneering initiative focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on AI ethics. She is also the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and a Research Associate Professor in Philosophy at Northeastern University, with affiliations with the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. With her team of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars, she provides hands-on, research based consulting in integrating ethics analyses into AI innovation and implementing responsible AI governance and strategy for organizations.
Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards and as an ethics advisor to Fortune 500 companies. She works with World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance in developing guidelines and best practices for “Responsible AI Application and Transformation” and “Responsible AI Playbook for Investors”. She co-designed and co-developed the “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement” for UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL, serving as their AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant.
Cansu primarily works on ethics of technology, having previously worked extensively on ethics and health. Prior to AI Ethics Lab, she was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization. Among others, she is also a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), serves as an ethics expert for EU and NIH funded research projects, chairs the IEEE AI Ethics Experts Network Criteria Committee and Northeastern’s IRB. A two-time TEDx speaker, Cansu has given over 150 talks on AI ethics, including keynotes at Harvard Business School, the U.S. Department of Justice, her TEDxCambridge talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles, and several others. She was listed among the “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston” and the original “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics”, nominated for the VentureBeat’s “Women in AI”, Responsible AI Institute’s “Leadership in Responsible AI”, and AIMed’s “AI Champions in Healthcare” awards, and recognized with Mozilla’s Rise25 “Change Agent” award. She is also the first technology and AI ethicist in Turkey.
For more detailed information, you can download her CV or contact her at cansu@aiethicslab.com.