Dr David Leslie (Principal Investigator)

Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research, Public Policy Programme, The Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society, Queen Mary University of London

David Leslie is the Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research at The Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at Queen Mary University of London. He was a 2017-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Fellow in Technology and the Humanities at Boston University and has previously taught at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (UCHV), where he also participated in the UCHV’s 2017-2018 research collaboration with Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy on “Technology Ethics, Political Philosophy and Human Values: Ethical Dilemmas in AI Governance.” Prior to teaching at Princeton, David held academic appointments at Yale’s programme in Ethics, Politics and Economics and at Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, where he received over a dozen teaching awards including the 2014 Stanley Hoffman Prize for Teaching Excellence.

David now serves as an elected member of the 9-person Bureau of the Council of Europe’s Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI). He is on the editorial board of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR) and is a founding editor of the Springer journal, AI and Ethics. He is the author of the UK Government’s official guidance on the responsible design and implementation of AI systems in the public sector, Understanding artificial intelligence ethics and safety (2019) and a principal co-author of Explaining decisions made with AI (2020), a co-badged guidance on AI explainability published by the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Alan Turing Institute. He was a Principal Investigator and co-author of the NESTA-funded Ethics review of machine learning in children’s social care (2020). David is also a co-author of Mind the gap: how to fill the equality and AI accountability gap in an automated world (2020), the Final Report of the Institute for the Future of Work’s Equality Task Force. His other recent publications include the HDSR article, “Tackling COVID-19 through responsible AI innovation: Five steps in the right direction,” (2020) and Understanding bias in facial recognition technologies: An explainer (2020).  In his shorter writings, David has explored subjects such as the life and work of Alan Turing, the Ofqual fiasco, the history of facial recognition systems and the conceptual foundations of AI for popular outlets from the BBC and the Turing Blog to Nature.