Cansu Canca

Cansu is the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and a Research Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She is affiliated with the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business.

Cansu has a doctorate in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She is the founder and director of AI Ethics Lab, one of the first initiatives focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on the ethics of artificial intelligence. She developed and implemented the Puzzle-solving in Ethics (PiE) Model, a dynamic and collaborative model for integrating ethics into AI innovation, which now forms the basis of EAI’s Responsible AI framework. She also works with the United Nations Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL as an AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant, building guidelines and tools for Responsible AI in law enforcement.

Cansu serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards. She serves as a member of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance working groups, ethics advisor to Fortune 500 companies, founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), ethics expert for EU- and NIH-funded research projects focusing on the ethics of AI, robotics, and human enhancement, and chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) AI Experts Network Criteria Committee.

Before her work in technology, Cansu spent more than a decade working in population-level bioethics on a range of topics including resource allocation and human subject research. She was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong Medical School and an ethics researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization. Frequently invited to speak to leaders in industry and academia, Cansu has given over 100 talks on AI ethics, including keynotes at Harvard Business School, the U.S. Department of Justice, her TEDxCambridge talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles, and several others. She received Mozilla's Rise25 Change Agent award, was recognized among the 30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston and the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, and was nominated for VentureBeat's Women in AI Award and AIMed's AI Champions in Healthcare Award.