Joanna J. BRYSON

Joanna Joy Bryson is a globally-recognised leader and expert in intelligence broadly defined, including AI policy and AI ethics. Her original academic focus was the natural sciences, using artificial intelligence for scientific simulations of natural cognitive systems. During her PhD she first observed the confusion generated by anthropomorphised AI, leading to her first ethics publication “Just Another Artifact” in 1998.

In 2010 her work in AI ethics was first recognised by a policy body when she was invited to participate in the UK research councils’ Robot Ethics retreat, where she was a key author of the UK’s (EPSRC/AHRC) “Principles of Robotics,” the world’s first national-level AI ethics soft policy. Her present research focuses on the impact of technology on economies and human cooperation, transparency for and through AI systems, interference in democratic regulation, and the future of labour, society, and digital governance. She consults frequently on policy, including to the UK (parliament, royal society, RCUK, FCA), EU/EP/EC, OSCE, OECD, Red Cross, Chatham House, CoE, IEEE, WEF, UN as well as government bodies in Switzerland, the US, Canada, and Germany. In 2020, Germany nominated her to the first cohort of experts for the Global Partnership of AI, where she chaired an AI Governance committee for two years starting in 2021.

Bryson holds two degrees each in psychology (BA Chicago & MPhil Edinburgh) and AI (MSc Edinburgh & PhD MIT). From 2002-2019 she was Computer Science faculty at the University of Bath, where she founded and led their AI research group; she has also held postdoctoral, sabbatical, or visiting positions at Harvard in Psychology; Oxford in Anthropology; Nottingham and Mannheim in Social Science Research, The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. She has been the Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, Berlin since February 2020.