Call for AI Ethics Fellows to Better Understand the Societal Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

MONTREAL - Dec. 19, 2018 - PRLog -- The Montreal Artificial Intelligence Ethics Institute (MAIEI) announces the launch and worldwide call for applications for the inaugural 2019-2020 MAIEI Fellowship. This one-year, non-residential global fellowship program is designed to amplify the work of a diverse range of practitioners and researchers in the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI.

"MAIEI was founded to help define humanity's place in a world increasingly characterized and driven by algorithms," says Abhishek Gupta, founder of MAIEI. "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 have a detrimental impact on society."

For the past two years, Gupta has been organizing and leading the AI Ethics community in Montreal. What started out as a simple experiment in building public competence in AI Ethics has grown into a movement of people that are empowered and informed to contribute to shaping technical and policy measures in the ethical and responsible development of AI.

MAIEI and the AI Ethics community includes over 1,350 members and has contributed to public policy recommendations, including the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence. MAIEI's work has been published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Oxford Internet Institute, among others.

"A key differentiator of the MAIEI Fellowship is our focus on applied experiments," says Renjie Butalid, co-founder of MAIEI. "We highly encourage field experiments that are driven by and for communities that will be impacted by AI. We believe that MAIEI Fellows will contribute to the creation and adoption of many technical and policy measures that address ethical, safety and inclusivity concerns in AI development."

MAIEI invites applications from people working on a broad range of opportunities and challenges related to the societal impacts of AI. This includes, but is not limited to, software engineers, scholars and researchers from all fields, as well as artists, philosophers and practitioners of all backgrounds.

Broad topics of interest at MAIEI include, but are not limited to: Social inclusion in AI, Mission-driven AI, AI Ethics in Medicine, Algorithms in Politics, the Malicious use of AI, Embedding values into machines, Algorithmic Discrimination, Algorithmic Impact Assessments, and Data Privacy and Access Controls.

MAIEI Fellows are expected to gather in-person three times a year. The first gathering will be in Montreal for one week in June 2019. The second and third gatherings will be two-day engagements in cities to be confirmed, scheduled for November 2019 and April 2020.

Academic, corporate and government partners, advisory board members and mentors for the 2019-2020 MAIEI Fellowship will be announced shortly.

Deadline for applications is Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 11:59PM ET. Potential applicants can find more information here: https://montrealethics.ai/fellowship/fellowship.html