Schwartz Reisman Institute releases 2021–24 strategic plan
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) has released its new strategic plan for 2021–2024, emphasizing the key objectives of promoting interdisciplinarity within U of T’s AI and society ecosystem, building new fields of research, supporting regulatory innovation, and fostering the development of AI for social good.
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) has released its new strategic plan (PDF), following an extended period of consultation between our leadership, Council of Deans, and the University of Toronto, including U of T’s Division of the Vice-President of Research and Innovation. SRI was created through a historic gift from Canadian entrepreneurs Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman in 2019, and is now entering its third year of operation.
SRI Director and Chair Gillian Hadfield
“We’re very excited to release this strategic plan to the world,” says SRI Director and Chair Gillian Hadfield. “The plan formalizes and communicates our vision, but it also outlines the concrete steps we’ll be taking to become the world’s leading institute ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies benefit all of humanity.”
“AI holds great promise for raising the quality of human life around the world,” says Hadfield. “This includes everything from improving healthcare delivery and battling climate change to tailoring service provision to the wide diversity of people around the globe.”
“But we need to build the technological, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needed to ensure that AI achieves its great promise,” says Hadfield. “We also need to make sure that our existing legal and regulatory systems do not unintentionally or unnecessarily block AI innovation. These two focus areas are fundamental to what drives our work at the Institute.”
➦ Read the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s strategic plan for 2021–2024 (PDF)
Strategic objectives
The SRI strategic plan envisions the Institute’s growth, goals, and metrics of success from 2021 to 2024, and is focused around four strategic objectives:
Interdisciplinarity: Increasing the range and depth of interdisciplinary research in the AI and society ecosystem at U of T and beyond.
Field-building: Fostering and advancing new fields of research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to deepen our understanding of powerful technologies and human relationships to technology.
Regulatory Innovation: Transforming the world’s approach to regulating powerful technologies.
AI for Social Good: Working with industry, governments, and civil society organizations to maximize the benefits that new powerful technologies can bring to people across income, class, gender, ethnicity, and global divides.
Achieving these objectives is already well underway, as the Institute’s work over its first two years demonstrates.
SRI Research Leads Lisa Austin and David Lie
For example, SRI Research Leads Lisa Austin and David Lie are a trailblazing interdisciplinary team whose work connects technical and legal perspectives to address pressing issues surrounding advanced technologies, such as privacy, consent, and data-sharing. Our academic conference, Absolutely Interdisciplinary, convenes researchers from different disciplines to tackle problems they have in common through sessions designed to build new fields of research. Our ongoing Solutions Stream collaborations with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Responsible AI Institute, and Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab are forging new paths in how we might oversee, regulate, and govern AI. And our AI for social good initiatives include workshops on liberating health data to improve patient outcomes and using commercial data for public benefit.
Overall, SRI has targeted multiple objectives through our ongoing weekly seminar series, featuring guest speakers from around the world sharing their discipline’s unique perspectives on the SRI’s core concerns while fostering dialogue across institutions, geographic locales, and academic research areas.
As the above projects show, SRI’s work extends far beyond the fundamental academic research we conduct. We also serve as a convener and a hub for paradigm-shifting public policy conversations, and we leverage our expertise to develop implementable human-centred solutions to today’s most pressing problems at the intersection of technology and society.
Want to follow us on our mission?
Read the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s new strategic plan for 2021–24 (PDF).
Learn about the four “conversations” that inform the work of the Institute.
Join one of our discussion groups, such as the monthly AI Safety group and mailing list.
Discover faculty and graduate student opportunities at SRI.
Keep an eye on our Twitter feed and LinkedIn page, or sign up for our monthly e-news to see SRI updates.
Join us at one of our virtual weekly seminars. Or watch recordings of past seminars on our website.
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