Data Debate: Cities – smart or sinister?
Monday 21 Oct 2019
Time: 19:00 - 21:30
Bio
Professor Sylvie Delacroix is the Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and the director of the Centre for Data Futures (King’s College London). She is also a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on the role played by habit within ethical agency, the social sustainability of the data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible and bottom-up data empowerment. The latter work led to the first data trusts pilots worldwide being launched in 2022 in the context of the Data Trusts initiative. Her latest book Habitual Ethics? was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (open-access).
Her work on agency-enhancing, participatory infrastructure and the communication of uncertainty in the context of LLMs deployed in morally-loaded contexts was funded by Omidyar Network. Previously, Professor Delacroix's work has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the NHS, Mozilla Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust, from whom she received the Leverhulme Prize.
The public policy dimensions of her work have led her to being invited to contribute to multiple policy initiatives. She has also acted as an expert for public bodies (such as the UK’s DCMS Department) and served on the Public Policy Commission on the use of algorithms in the justice system (Law Society of England and Wales).
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. 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. She co-chairs the Data Trusts initiative with Turing AI Fellow Neil Lawrence.
