Profile: Dr Atoosa Kasirzadeh, CTMF Research Lead and Chancellor’s Fellow
Dr Atoosa Kasirzadeh
About
Chancellor’s Fellow Dr. Atoosa Kasirzadeh joined the Centre for Technomoral Futures as Research Lead in January 2022. Previously, she was a visiting researcher at Google DeepMind (London, UK) and a postdoctoral fellow for the Humanizing Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge at the Australian National University. She holds two PhDs, one in Philosophy of Science and Technology (University of Toronto) and one in Mathematics (Polytechnique Montréal). Among her recent achievements, she is a programme Co-chair for 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) and the Principal Investigator for 2023 Edinburgh-Turing New Perspectives on AI Futures workshops.
Dr. Kasirzadeh plays a key role in the life of the Centre, working alongside the Director and Programme Manager to develop and oversee the Baillie Gifford programme and the Centre’s suite of activities.
Research
Dr Kasirzadeh’s research revolves around three interrelated questions: : 1) how computational tools can be used effectively to understand the world and ourselves, 2) the social and ethical impacts of computational technologies on our thinking and lives, and 3) how to influence the design and deployment of technological ecosystems for a better and more just world.
Over the past two years, Dr Kasirzadeh has primarily focused on understanding the socio-ethical implications of generative artificial intelligence (also known as the foundation models). She is a co-author of a paper titled “Taxonomy of risks posed by language models” , published in the proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. She continues to produce leading research in the field. A paper on which she was a lead author (co-authored with Iason Gabriel), titled "In conversation with AI: aligning language models with human values" was recently published in Philosophy & Technology. Currently, she is a DCMS/UKRI Senior Policy Fellow for research on the governance and policy implications of Generative AI. She also has a media piece published in the Royal Society of Edinburgh magazine, titled “The Socio-Technical Challenges of Generative AI.” and continues to work in this space.
Work
Dr Kasirzadeh writes and teaches about issues such as the ethics and philosophy of AI and computing, the roles of mathematics in empirical sciences and normative inquiry, the epistemological and social implications of mathematical and computational modeling in the socio-economic world, values in sciences and decision making, and modeling of morality.
In 2022, Dr Kasirzadeh served as lead investigator on a grant from the Alan Turing Institute, through which the Centre for Technomoral Futures organised a workshop series in early 2023 centred around “New Perspectives on AI Futures,” which aimed to surface approaches to human flourishing with artificial intelligence with the goal to bring together diverse and underrepresented perspectives to create a shared vision for AI futures. The outputs of these workshops, including a set of provocations that will inform a workshop run by the Centre at the Scottish AI summit on the 29th March 2023, will continue to form the basis for future activities at the Centre.
In addition to her research work, Dr Kasirzadeh supervises Baillie Gifford PhD student Charlotte Bird at the Centre for Technomoral Futures.