Nov 2017

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 2, 2017—Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics was named as one of 21 new members of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI). PAI is a non-profit organization working to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field.

“Artificial intelligence presents a fast growing range of difficult ethical challenges for American and global society. The Markkula Center has demonstrated that it can address rapidly developing ethical challenges and make productive contributions to how they are handled by organizations and governments,” said Kirk Hanson, director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

The objective of the Partnership on AI is to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society. Together, the organization’s members will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology.

“The Partnership on AI is an organization built on the ethical ideal that AI should benefit people and society. From my experience at the recent PAI meeting in Berlin, I know that this ethical ideal really is the driving force bringing all the very diverse partners together, in the hope that AI can be used for great good, and that AI’s evil uses can be avoided,” said Brian Green, assistant director of campus ethics programs at the Markkula Center. “Given PAI's ethical mission, the Markkula Center is in exactly the right place, in the middle of great people representing great organizations, who want to deeply engage ethical questions and improve the world.”

The efforts of the Partnership on AI are organized around a set of thematic pillars, which currently include:

• Safety-Critical AI
• Fair, Transparent, and Accountable AI
• Collaborations Between People and AI Systems
• AI, Labor, and the Economy
• Social and Societal Influences on AI
• AI and Social Good
• Special Initiatives
  
  

The partners hail from three continents and represent a broad cross-section of industry, nonprofit, and academic organizations.

See the full list of Founding Partners.

About Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, offers its more than 9,000 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, theology, and engineering, plus master’s and law degrees and engineering doctoral degrees. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. master’s universities, California’s oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.

Media Contact
Deepa Arora | SCU Media Communications | darora@scu.edu | (408) 554-5125