Research visit to America!

Earlier this week we spoke to Pepi Barnard, a Research Associate at Horizon. Pepi is currently touring America. “Travelling to and around the USA this month is exciting and a bit surreal, especially after a long time at home”.

“I attended the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference (AAAL2022) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I presented a paper for the Coronavirus Discourses project (C19COMMS). The paper, titled “Public Health Messaging for At-risk Populations: a UK-based case study”, was very well received, generating a great deal of discussion and interest to collaborate with us in the future.”

Pepi went on to tell us “so far I have had appointments in San Francisco and at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Meeting with people at Stanford University’s School of Medicine’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, the Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the School of Computer Science – including the Institute for Human-centred AI (HAI) – has been so interesting. Our conversations are being driven by questions designed to explore views about trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) and trustworthy autonomous systems (TAS).”

Pepi is now in New York and will join Joel Fischer on a visit to Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island to meet researchers for discussions about trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) and trustworthy autonomous systems (TAS). Following that, the plan is to travel to Boston for more talks before returning to the UK. She went on to explain:

“Throughout our visit, we have been using the Moral-IT cards to highlight: concerns, issues, and risks, safeguards that may help manage the concerns, and barriers that may challenge the application of the identified safeguards. The Moral-IT cards, were designed at Horizon, and have proved useful in eliciting views and generating discussions. The Moral-IT card sorting exercise is also generating views about how they may be further developed to suit the topic of trustworthy intelligent and autonomous systems.”

Pepi finished up by telling us “I am so grateful to Sharon Chiu (HAI) who generously gave up her time make sure I was comfortable and well refreshed while visiting the William Gates Computer Science Building. Yes, that William (Bill) Gates!”.

Tags: AI, autonomous, autonomous systems, coronavirus, Moral IT cards, public health messaging, TAS, trustworthy, Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, USA