Montreal AI Ethics Institute

Defining humanity's place in a world of algorithms

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Mission

Our mission is to help define humanity’s place in a world increasingly characterized and driven by algorithms. We do this by creating tangible and applied technical and policy research in the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI. Our unique advantage in Montreal is that we are situated globally at the leading edge of technical research while leveraging strong Canadian values of diversity and inclusion.

“Treating AI as inherently good overlooks the important research and development needed for ethical, safe and inclusive applications. Poor data, inexplicable code or rushed deployment can easily lead to AI systems that are not worth celebrating.” – Abhishek Gupta, World Economic Forum.

Values

We are focused on the applied and practical, not theoretical.

We enable citizen empowerment to enhance policy development on the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI.

We act as a pool of knowledge and resources to enable applied experiments that will build tangible frameworks to address ethical, safety and inclusion issues in AI development.

We publish all our research open-source and strive for scientific and technical reproducibility.

At the end of 2018, our founder Abhishek Gupta won the Community Organizer of the Year award within Montreal’s startup community for hosting the official Montreal AI Ethics Meetup. The award is given to the individual who best mobilizes people in the community for good.

An inclusive, award-winning AI Ethics community

Since July 2017, we have grown our community to over 1400+ members and have hosted over 40+ meetups. These AI Ethics Meetups enable civic engagement to enhance policy development on the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI. 

Our members come from diverse backgrounds such as computer science, law, sociology, business, government policy, and so on. We meet in Montreal every 2-3 weeks and are hosted by many different organizations and community partners. We keep the conversation alive between meetups on our public Slack channel.

Our partners spanning academia, government, corporations and community are essential in making the work of the institute a success. They generously share their space for us to host our community building and civic engagement activities while also feeding the virtuous cycle of involving their own members deeper into the discussions.

Our AI Ethics Meetups in Montreal allow our community to provide feedback and recommendations to public documents like the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI. They also provide insights to a number of active research projects we are currently undertaking with a number of academic collaborators around the world.

Issues we’re interested in:

Social inclusion in AI: Technical and policy approaches to increase social inclusion in the entire pipeline of AI – from design and conception, data collection and use all the way to the end-of-life management of a project. 

Mission-driven AI: How non-profits, social enterprises and NGOs can leverage machine learning solutions to help them stretch their donation dollars further by scaling the work that they do and increasing efficiency of their operations. 

AI Ethics in Medicine: Informed consent and its ethical implications in the field of medicine, especially when AI-enabled solutions are used in diagnosis and clinical trials. 

Algorithms in Politics: A look at how automation of propaganda in the political sphere happens and what measures and practices we can put in place to prevent some of the issues that arise as we push society towards higher divisiveness.

AI and Business: How AI is changing the way we do business. 

AI and Law: Legal and ethical implications with the increasing use of AI in the context of emerging privacy and data security laws like the GDPR. 

The Malicious use of AI: Outlining the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI technologies, proposing ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. 

Impact of China on AI: China’s phenomenal rise in developing and deploying AI is quickly becoming both an inspirational model for how a national strategy can be effectively developed to dominate a field and a cause for concern in terms of ethics.

Embedding values into machines: How best to embed values into machines, what the implications of this are. 

Algorithmic Discrimination: Impacts of using data-driven approaches and algorithms in the workplace drawing upon economic and social science theory. 

Algorithmic Impact Assessments: An interesting way to evaluate how algorithmic systems and society interact and what kind of contract could potentially be setup between both parties to allow for a more beneficial interaction. 

Data Privacy and Access Controls: What is the definition of control regarding personal data? How can we redefine data access to honor the individual?

Previous speaking engagements:

  • Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University (2018)
  • European Parliament in Brussels (2017)
  • AI for Good Global Summit 2017 & 2018 at the United Nations in Geneva
  • The Next Web Conference 2018 in Amsterdam
  • REWORK Deep Learning Summit 2018 in San Francisco
  • REWORK Industrial Automation Summit 2018 in San Francisco
  • Rightscon 2018 in Toronto
  • ReframeWork 2018 in Vancouver
  • AI World Forum 2017 in Toronto

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