EthicAI=2021

EthicAI=LABS 2021 PUBLICATION

The pilot edition of the EthicAI=LABS project gave 18 professionals, coming from artistic, humanitarian and technical background to collaborate and explore the connection between Ethics and Artificial Intelligence from the perspectives of Linguistics, Media, Bias and Creativity. The outcomes of their collaboration are presented in this publication, as each group has a separate chapter to present its research and/or project. The second part of the book collects texts by experts on AI & Ethics and its relation to the project topics – linguistics, creativity, bias, and media. Most of them were speakers in the EthicAI=Labs workshops and events: Dr. Nevena Ivanova (BG), Prof. Liviu P. Dinu (RO), Dr. Eva Cetinić (HR), Dr. Mihaela Constantinescu (RO) and Manolis Adriotakis (GR). The other text contributors are invited to broaden the picture and our understanding of current issues related with AI & Ethics: Inke Arns (DE), Leonardo Impett (GB), and Derrick de Kerckhove (BE). Enjoy reading!
 

Ajla Kulaglic

Computer Engineer Graduate
Ph. D. Candidate in Computer Engineering
Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

© Ajla Kulaglic Research project(s):       

• Financial time-series forecasting (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)
• Detection of river flow changes of Bosna River (University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• Erasmus+ E-vivaenhancing and validating service-related competencies in versatile learning environments in Western Balkan Universities (University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• Agricultural monitoring and information system project (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)

Outstanding achievements/awards:

• The student award to the best lecturer (University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, December 2017)
• Turkish government scholarship (Scholarship for the Turkish Language and PhD studies, 2010-2015)
• Award for the most hardworking students in academic year 2006/2007 (University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Electrical Engineering)
• Award for the most hardworking students in academic year 2005/2006 (University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Electrical Engineering)

Albena Baeva

Visual Artist
Curator
Producer
Sofia (Bulgaria)

© Rene Beekman Albena Baeva works at the intersection of art, technology and social science. She is a visual artist, curator and producer. In her interactive installations for urban spaces and galleries, she uses ML and AI, physical computing, creative coding, and DIY practices.
 
Albena has two MAs; in Restoration and Digital Arts from the National Academy of Art in Sofia. She received an Everything is Just Fine commission from the Bulgarian Fund for Women (2019), won the international Essl Art Award for contemporary art (2011) and the VIG Special Invitation (2011).
 
Albena is a co-founder of Runabout project, a platform for new performance instruments, the studio for interactive design Reaktiv and gallery Gallery.
 
Her work was shown in museums for contemporary art including Essl (Austria, 2011), EMMA (Finland, 2013), MCV Vojvodina (Serbia, 2015 and 2019), galleries and festivals for video and performance in Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Switzerland, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine and the USA.

Ana-Maria Pleșca

M.A. student
Berlin (Germany)

© Antonia Ispas My name is Ana-Maria Pleșca and I am currently finishing my Master's studies in Linguistics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. My primary expertise lies in psycholinguistics, more precisely in the empirical study of the social contextual effects on language comprehension. I am fascinated by the inner workings and mental processes behind language processing, as well as by computational linguistics and AI. I think that the (psycho)linguistic perspective represents an essential element when it comes to putting artificial intelligence into perspective. Bringing insights from linguistics into the AI equation is not only essential when it comes to defining information structuring, but it may also reveal important aspects of human cognition and intelligence, which may aid in refining the extant models of knowledge and information that AI is based on. I am very glad to be able to part of EthicsAI, because the interdisciplinarity of this workshop is a much-needed impulse to help us gain a better understanding and perspective of the implications of AI and how it can be best put at use so that it can benefit the future of humans.

Busra Sarigul

Researcher on Social Robotics and HCI (human-computer-interaction)
Ankara (Turkey)

© Busra Sarigul Busra Sarigul completed her BSc Psychology and MSc Interdisciplinary Social Psychiatry at Ankara University. She fostered a love for human – robot interaction, especially questioned what kind of language we need to use on designing agents and how we perceive them. Busra has been involved in various projects in pioneering research groups in this field such as Social Human Agent (sHAI) Lab, Radboud University in Netherlands and Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) Lab, Bilkent University in Turkey. One of her studies was presented at HRI 2020 Cambridge with her master supervisor Dr. Burcu Aysen Urgen. She is very excited to continue her journey as a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at Ankara University under the supervision of Professor Asim Egemen Yilmaz.
Through her studies, she has taken a particular interest in social robotics and chatbots, specifically, multimodal integration, natural language processing, and the integration of virtual agents in everyday life.

Dessislava Fessenko

Lawyer
Sofia (Bulgaria)

© Kosse Bosse Dessislava is a lawyer with focus on artificial intelligence and background in technology, data and antitrust regulations, and philosophy.
 
She works, among others, on public policy, regulatory and ethical considerations concerning digital technologies and, in particular, privacy and artificial intelligence.
 
In the area of ethics of artificial intelligence, Dessislava is concerned with and researches/writes about ethics of risk and regulation, ethically robust conceptual design of AI regulation, value alignment, algorithmic decision-making, and moral agency of algorithms.
 
A sports aficionado, an amateur photographer, a piano enthusiast.

Dorin Cucicov

Interactive artist and Software engineer
Bukarest (Romania)

© Dorin Cucicov Dorin is an interactive artist and software developer based in Bucharest. He has a BA in computer science and in 2020 he graduated from the MA Interactive Technologies in Media and Performance Art at the UNATC University in Bucharest. His interests are focused on the relationship between humans and technology – to what extent does technology influence our lives and where exactly should we draw the line. In his MA thesis he focused on the concept of sentient machines and what role emotions play in the human-machine relationship. During the last 3 years he has developed a couple of interactive installations tackling this dualism. He’s also working with sound performances with DIY electronic controllers and live coding.

Fatih Sinan Esen

Computer Engineer, Lecturer, Social Entrepreneur
Ankara (Turkey)

© Fatih Sinan Esen Fatih Sinan Esen was born in Ankara in 1984. He received his undergraduate degree from Bilkent University Computer Engineering (Ankara, Turkey), his MBA degree from Istanbul Bilgi University (Istanbul, Turkey) and his PhD degree from Gazi University Business Administration (Ankara, Turkey). After working for some private companies, he joined the government as Assistant Scientific Programs Expert in The Scientific and Technological research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), where he has been promoted to the senior position, Scientific Programs Chief Expert, in 2018.

Currently, he has responsibilities including the development of the Artificial Intelligence Technology Roadmap of Turkey and policies about digital transformation including. Academically, he has published many scientific articles, book chapters and has written a book published by an international publisher. Currently, his areas of concentration are artificial intelligence with a special focus on artificial neural networks and expert systems. He has been teaching AI courses in top universities.
 
His current areas of interest are Artificial Intelligence (especially Machine Learning and Deep Learning), Data Analytics and Text Mining, Social Media and Social Network Analysis and Marketing, Management and Organizational Behavior.

Visit Fatih Sinan Esen on scholar.google.com

Ivana Tkalčić

Artist
Zagreb (Croatia)

© Tea Ivković Ivana Tkalčić (*1987, Croatia) studied at Academy of fine arts (MA) in Zagreb and Munich. Graduated economics and tourism at Faculty of Economics (mag oec.) in Zagreb. After graduation, she's been working on projects at artist residencies in Austria, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Italy, Netherlands and Poland.

She has exhibited independently a number of times in Croatia and Europe, as well as taken part in group exhibitions abroad.

Awards: HPB Grand Prix award – 35th Youth Salon, HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia, Erste fragments 12, RCAA young European art award and Rector's Award of the University of Zagreb for the independent work of art. Recently she was chosen as a finalist for 20th Radoslav Putar Award, Young Visual Artists Awards, Institute of Contemporary Art (Croatia).

Participant of the WHW Academy, generation 2019/2020.

Visit Ivana Tkalčić on ivanatkalcic.com

Katerina Gkoutziouli

Curator
Researcher
Cultural Manager
Athens (Greece)

© Katerina Gkoutziouli Katerina Gkoutziouli is a curator, researcher and project manager based in Athens, Greece. Her research focus is on art and digital culture and its impact on public and networked space exploring issues related to cultural identity, network politics, surveillance in and on the Internet, data-mining, big data and emerging AI technologies. She has worked as a curator, researcher, mentor, cultural consultant and project manager in public institutions and cultural organisations, such as the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Goethe Institute in Athens, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Municipality of Athens, the Athens Development and Destination Management Agency, the Benaki Museum, SIGGRAPH Festival, Bios-Romantso, among others. She has curated exhibitions, workshops and collaborative projects with international artists and curators for different institutions as well as independently. She has also written essays and articles for art publications and online media on issues related to digital culture and the regeneration of public spaces through culture. She holds an MA in Visual Culture from the University of Westminster (London, UK) and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Athens. She is a Fulbright Fellow.

Visit Katerina Gkoutziouli on therestis.art

Kemal Halilović

Student at the university of University of Sarajevo (Faculty of Electrical Engineering)
Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

© Kemal Halilović Kemal Halilović is currently a third year B.Sc. student in Computing and Informatics, from the University of Sarajevo (Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During his study he has been a part of the Electrical Engineering Students European Association (EESTEC), where he organized events for the university, such as student job fairs, seminars and assistance groups. He has worked on studies related to predictive algorithms and neural networks, examining their development and use. His research interests involve Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, Cryptography.

Marko Mrvoš

Digital Creator
Rijeka (Croatia)

© Marko Mrvoš Marko Mrvoš (born 1999) is a digital creator who uses a broad range of software to accomplish his art pieces. His background consists of graphic design, video producing, and sculpturing: real material and virtual. Everything from commercial software to free and open source. From 2D graphics, 3D objects, virtual worlds and AI. 4 main acronyms that he uses are AI, AR, VR, and 3D.
 
His work was part of Glowing Globe, Institut français de Croatie, Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture within the program direction 27 Neighborhoods – Neighborhood Campus and UNIRI project for Interdisciplinary Research and Application new media technologies in the field of art and virtual reality resulted with participation in the exhibitions Outlandish Rijeka in the frame of ESOF 2020 in Trieste.
 
Since 2019, he has been systematically cooperating with the Center for Innovative Media of the Academy of Applied Arts of the University of Rijeka as an advisor for virtual and augmented reality projects on research projects and the application of virtual reality in new media art. From 2020 he is a student assistant at the Department of Intermedia, Academy of Applied Arts.

Matko Vlahović

Journalist

© Matko Vlahović Matko Vlahović (b.1993) studied philosophy and currently works as a journalist and critic in the non-profit media. His academic research focuses on social epistemology and materialist approaches to rationality.
 
Matko considers the general discourse about AI as being produced at an intersection of different narratives ranging from pop-culture imaginary, automatisation, technical knowledge, ideologies of contemporary society, to seemingly fundamental questions about the nature and ethics of consciousness. He believes that this ideologically dominant way of thinking about AI, where AI shows up on a stage as radically new technology, shifts the public and academic debates into abstract and mystical realms, into the territories of overly contrived philosophical puzzles, instead of studying concrete social relations that determine the development of technologies.

Nasir Muftić

Reasearch and Teaching Assistant
PhD student
AI liability
Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

© Nasir Muftić Nasir Muftić is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Law of the University of Sarajevo with teaching and research tasks. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Sarajevo in 2016 and obtained an LL.M. degree in International Business Law from the Central European University in 2017. He completed traineeships at the Constitutional Court of Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Supreme Court of Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before the commencement of his doctoral studies, Nasir worked as a legal assistant at BH Telecom JSC in the fields of media and telecommunications law, civil litigation, intellectual property law, commercial contract drafting, and regulatory compliance. His doctoral research is focused on the legal implications of artificial intelligence with an emphasis on liability.

Sinem Görücü

Design Researcher, Architect, Data Activist
London (United Kingdom)

© Sinem Görücü Sinem Görücü is a creative, design researcher, architect and data activist; working at the intersections of design, data science, artificial intelligence, feminism and social justice. She holds an MArch degree from the UCL-Bartlett School of Architecture with her dissertation titled “Data Bias and Domestic Futures”, an MCP degree from METU
and a BArch from Gazi University. She also previously studied at Politecnico di Milano as an exchange student taking courses on digital cities, and at KU Leuven Design[x]Research Lab as a research intern.

Sinem Görücü is the co-founder of Creative Feminism Lab; an independent research initiative seeking feminist futures with a political and social discourse on data and tech. Sinem’s current design, art and research works mainly focus on data bias and design justice and explore a wide range of related issues.

Her individual and group works have been exhibited in Milan, İstanbul, Minsk, Byblos, Bucharest, Ankara and Lisbon. She has been active in national and international NGOs and NPOs where she also held leadership roles. She is a member of several networks including: Meeting of Design Students Network where she is also the national contact person for Turkey, Futuress where she is also a research fellow, Design Justice Network and others.

Stefania Budulan

AI Software Engineer
Bukarest (Romania)

© Stefania Budulan Stefania Budulan (b.1991) is a Romanian AI Software Engineer with more than 5 years of hands-on experience, developing AI-driven solutions for industries such as interior design, media, banking, telekom and IoT, as well as a fundamental research advocate, being enrolled as a Ph.D. student in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the University Politehnica of Bucharest. Throughout time, she was involved in multiple education processes: Computer Science teaching assistant, software academy trainer, and coordinator of the AI research development of BSc. and MSc. students.
 
Stefania has a strong interest towards creating viable state-of-the-art solutions for industrial use, thus reducing the gap between academic research and the industry reach and potential. Being an AI researcher and a software engineer, an AI Ethics, Policy and Governance promoter, and an avid art enthusiast, she thoroughly believes that data protection policies and model understanding have to be reinforced in order to build safe AI products, escape human errors and data biases (e.g., gender bias, racial bias), increase AI explainability and diminish the amount of misleading information (e.g., fake news, deepfake videos).

Tsvetomila Mihaylova

PhD candidate
Lisbon (Portugal)

© Tsvetomila Mihaylova Tsvetomila Mihaylova is a PhD candidate at Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal, working on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She is working on models which try to find structure in language.
 
Before her PhD, she had worked as a software developer for about ten years. She has a master’s degree in Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery from Sofia University and another master’s in IT Project Management from New Bulgarian University. Her bachelor’s degree is in Computer Systems and Technologies from the Technical University of Sofia.
 
In her free time, she works on the project “Dialekti” which aims to preserve and promote the diversity of the Bulgarian language in an interesting way.
 
Although she works on what can be defined as Artificial Intelligence, Tsvetomila doesn’t like the term, mainly because of its wrong representation in the media and other popular channels. She wants to contribute to the project EthicAI by providing a realistic point of view about what “AI” really is from a technical perspective and what its capabilities and limitations are. Her interest in ethics in AI started from reading the book “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O'Neil which describes how the blind usage of "big data" can deepen inequality and can sometimes cause more harm than bring benefits.

Vassilios Bokos

Attorney at Law
Athens (Greece)

© Vassilios Bokos Born in 1978 in Serres, Greece, he grew up in Germany and studied Law and Political Sciences at the universities of Thrace, Munich and Athens. He got a post graduate degree on “European and International Studies” with a degree project entitled “Integration Principle of the environmental dimension in E.U. policies”.

As a lawyer, member of the Athens Bar Association since 2004, he has been handling cases of Civil and Commercial Law, contracts, real estate management with participation in the Free Legal Help Program, concerning destitute citizens and since 2017 he is specialized in Blockchain as legal advisor of companies that deal with Blockchain technology.

Simultaneously, since 2004, he has been working as a scientific assistant for the Hellenic Parliament with expertise on matters concerning the Ministries of Internal Affairs, Justice, Civilian Protection, Economy, Environment and Energy.
Furthermore, he is Secretary General of the BD of the “Association of Artificial Intelligence” aka “A.I.Catalyst” in Greece and was member of the BD of Policy Academy “Alexandros Papanastasiou”.

The environment, climate change, energy, E.U. Integration, culture, policy strategy, communication, architecture and modern technologies and especially A.I. & Blockchain comprise the fields of his main interests.

With mother language Greek he speaks German and English fluently. He participates in voluntary and cultural groups.

Yiannis Kiouvrekis

Professor of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Karditsa (Greece)

© Yiannis Kiouvrekis Yiannis Kiouvrekis is a mathematician, a graduate of the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the National Technical University of Athens. As a doctoral student at the Mathematics Sector of NTUA, he completed his doctoral dissertation titled “Topological Models, Computer Science, Semantics, and Applications of Logic in AI.” He is working on applications of theoretical mathematics, e.g. mathematical logic and topology, in fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analysis. His current work focuses on the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, a new AI field, and more precisely on the question of how human beings can understand a proof produced by a machine.

In September 2020 he was selected as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Public and Integrated Health at the University of Thessaly on the subject of “Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence in Health Sciences.” In recent years, he has been employed as an Adjunct Faculty  at the Hellenic Open University, the University of Nicosia, the Open University of Cyprus, the University of West Attica, and the University of Aegean, teaching several subjects such as Mathematical Logic, Cognitive Agents and Reasoning, Discrete Mathematics and Decision-making, and Modeling. Since 2021 he is senior researcher and manager of the AI projects at DAEM the IT Company of City of Athens. Yiannis Kiouvrekis is also a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Mechanical Engineering at NTUA.