Four new SRI faculty fellows expand research to robotics, decolonialism, “moral machines,” and human rights
Four new SRI faculty fellows join the Schwartz Reisman Institute for 2021-23. L to R: Rosalie Wang (Dept. of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy), Jason Plaks (Dept. of Psychology), Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (Dept. of Computer Science), Anna Su (Faculty of Law).
The Schwartz Reisman research community continues to grow with the appointment of four new faculty fellows from across the University of Toronto’s three campuses.
As outstanding U of T scholars from across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, the four new faculty fellows joining us for a two-year term will play an active role in SRI’s diverse community, fostering interdisciplinary connections and research, leading and participating in workshops, seminars, and conferences, and contributing to SRI’s goal to be a global leader in ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies benefit all of humanity.
Our new faculty fellows join the Institute at a pivotal time, as we release our first strategic plan (PDF) to guide our work for the next four years.
Read on to learn more about our new faculty fellows’ research and how their contributions will help shape the global impact of the Institute.
2021–23 Faculty Fellows
Rosalie Wang is an assistant professor at U of T’s Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, where she researches assistive and rehabilitation technology, including the ways in which such technologies are developed and evaluated. Central to her work is a focus on user-centred design, incorporating fundamental aspects of ethics and equity.
Wang’s research at SRI will look at AI-enabled care technologies in the social and healthcare ecosystems of seniors and caregivers. What ethical concerns arise with the integration of these technologies? How do they affect both the individual and relational autonomy of the people within these ecosystems? Wang employs mixed methods and broad transdisciplinary lenses in her work, an approach that will no doubt strengthen the interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations already underway at SRI.
“An increased number of seniors need care, and yet there is an expected shortage of funding and working-age caregivers,” says Wang. “AI-enabled assistive technologies and living environments are in rapid development, and could afford seniors opportunities to live more independently and safely at home and in their communities.”
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed is an assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Computer Science, and is already a member of the SRI research community as one of our faculty affiliates. His research sits at the intersection of computer science and the critical social sciences, with a focus on human-computer interaction, ethics in AI, social justice, and sustainability issues.
As an SRI fellow, Ahmed’s project aims to de-centre and diversify western discourses on ethics in AI by incorporating various moral and ethical practices from the Global South that address faith, religion, tradition, culture, and histories particular to this region.
“My ongoing work is focusing on various data practices in rural and religious communities in Bangladesh and the ways they define intelligence through their local ethics,” says Ahmed. “This project is very well-aligned with SRI’s research goals and priorities, advancing SRI’s agendas of diversity and inclusion, human-centered solutions, and multidisciplinary approaches.”
Ahmed’s collaborators reflect the interdisciplinary approach to research at SRI: his project involves people from a diverse set of backgrounds, including computer science and social sciences as well as law, the software industry, government organizations, NGOs, and social work.
Jason Plaks is an associate professor in U of T’s Department of Psychology who specializes in social psychology, folk beliefs, moral decision making, and human-robot interaction. His research as an SRI faculty fellow will examine the moral psychology of decision-making machines. It’s well-known that automated decision-making systems have a vast impact in what Plaks calls “morally-fraught contexts,” such as military strike decisions, hospital triage protocols, and autonomous vehicles.
“Many people remain skeptical of ‘moral machines,’” says Plaks. “My project will study people interacting with robots in moral contexts with the aim of seeing which psychological features in robots have the greatest influence on humans’ acceptance or rejection of the robots’ decisions.”
Plaks’ work will, among other things, contribute to SRI’s ongoing engagement with the alignment problem—the ideal that an artificial agent’s actions should align with human norms and values. His work on cognition, agency, values, and morals aims to get to the crux of no less than what it means to be human.
“The lion’s share of research on human-robot interaction (HRI) has been conducted by engineers and computer scientists, not psychologists,” says Plaks. “Thus, new technologies are often designed with inadequate understanding of users’ fundamental assumptions, lay theories, and moral intuitions. In other words, the ‘H’ in ‘HRI’ remains comparatively underdeveloped.”
Joining Wang, Ahmed, and Plaks as a faculty fellow is Anna Su, an associate professor in U of T’s Faculty of Law who is also cross-appointed to the Department of History. Su’s research in law and the history of international human rights will expand during her time at SRI to include human rights and the governance of AI—a topic which a number of SRI researchers, including Research Lead Wendy Wong, are already engaged with. What could a human-rights oriented framework bring to the design and engineering of algorithms?
Su’s work will help strengthen SRI’s strategic objective to spearhead regulatory innovation, transforming the world’s approach to regulating powerful technologies like AI.
Su, Plaks, Ahmed, and Wang join four existing SRI faculty fellows—Kristen Bos, Aleksandar (Sasho) Nikolov, Nisarg Shah, and Karina Vold—whose term extends until the end of 2021.
