A talk by Professor Alan Winfield

Professor Alan Winfield will present new work that explores the question of ethical governance for robotics and AI systems. He will first outline a roadmap – which links a number of elements including ethics, standards, regulation, responsible research and innovation and public engagement – as a framework to guide ethical governance in robotics and AI. To conclude, the question ‘what is good ethical governance in robotics and AI and who’s doing it?’ will be addressed.

About Professor Alan Winfield

Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of York. He received his PhD in Digital Communications from the University of Hull in 1984, then co-founded and led APD Communications Ltd until taking-up appointment at UWE in 1992.

Alan co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where his research is focused on the science and engineering of cognitive robotics and his current projects are focused on robots with simulation-based internal models and multi-robot systems in critical environments.

Alan is passionate about communicating research and ideas in science, engineering and technology and led UK-wide public engagement project Walking with Robots, awarded the 2010 Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke medal for public promotion of engineering. Until recently he was director of UWE’s Science Communication Unit. Alan is frequently called upon by the press and media to comment on developments in AI and robotics and was a guest on the BBC R4 series The Life Scientific and more recently interviewed for BBC News HARDtalk.

He is an advocate for robot ethics and sits on the executive of the IEEE Standards Association Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and chairs Working Group P7001, drafting a new IEEE standard on Transparency of Autonomous Systems. Alan has published over 240 works, including Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) and lectures widely on robotics, presenting to both academic and public audiences. Read more on Alan's blog.

This event is being run in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute.

The Alan Turing Institute's mission as the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence is to make great leaps in research in order to change the world for the better. Find out more