Data Debate: Cities – smart or sinister?
Monday 21 Oct 2019
Time: 19:00 - 21:30
Bio
Sylvie Delacroix is professor in Law and Ethics at the University of Birmingham, which she joined in January 2018, coming from UCL where she was a reader in Legal Theory and Ethics, with a fractional appointment in UCL Computer Science. Prior to that Sylvie was the Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University, 2004-05), a lecturer in Law in Kent University and a post-doctoral scholar in Trinity College, Cambridge University. While in UCL Sylvie Delacroix was the founding Director of the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law, as well as the UCL Virtual Environments and the Professions Group. Professor Delacroix's work has notably been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the NHS and the Leverhulme Trust, from whom she received the Leverhulme Prize. Professor Delacroix has recently been appointed to the Public Policy Commission on the use of algorithms in the justice system (Law Society of England and Wales).
She co-chairs the Data Trusts initiative with Neil Lawrence.
Research interests
Professor Delacroix focuses on the intersection between law and ethics, with a particular interest in Machine Ethics, Agency and the role of habit within moral decisions (Habitual Ethics?, Bloomsbury, 2019). Her current research focuses on the design of both decision-support and `autonomous systems meant for morally-loaded contexts, with a focus on the processes underlying both legal and medical decisions.She also researches the impact of the profile-based optimisation of our environment on ethical agency. She is currently considering the potential inherent in 'bottom-up' Data Trusts as a mechanism to address power imbalances between data-subjects and data-controllers (in collaboration with Neil Lawrence).
