ESMT Open Lecture “AI and ethics”
with Dr. Meike Zehlike, Senior Researcher, Zalando
Moderator: Dr. Urs Müller, Affiliate Program Director, ESMT Berlin, and Associate Professor of Practice, SDA Bocconi
June 27, 2023, 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
via livestream
This event will take place in person in Auditorium 4 and online. To attend the event online, please use the registration form below.
To attend the event in person, please register here.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing field with the potential to transform numerous industries and improve our daily lives. However, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, there is a growing concern about its ethical implications. The development and use of AI raise complex ethical issues such as privacy, bias, accountability, and the potential for harm.
In this ESMT Open Lecture, we will hear from Dr. Meike Zehlike, senior researcher at Zalando and a distinguished expert on AI and ethics. The lecture will explore what AI is, how it works, and the ways in which it is changing the world around us. We will learn about the ethical considerations that arise with the use of AI, the various problems we are facing today, and the importance of developing ethical AI systems that are designed with the desired human values and rights in mind. Dr. Zehlike will address the different approaches to ethical AI and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in this area. Additionally, she will discuss the role of governments, businesses, and individuals in ensuring that AI is developed and used in a responsible and ethical manner.
About the speakers
Dr. Meike Zehlike received her PhD with predicate Summa Cum Laude from Humboldt-University in 2022. Her doctoral research focused on fairness and discrimination in rankings and search, and her dissertation contains several seminal and highly cited publications in the research field of fair rankings. She has received various grants and awards for her research, such as the Humboldt prize for outstanding dissertations 2022, the Google Women Techmaker Award 2019, and the Data Transparency Research Grant 2017. Since 2019, she is a member of the European League of Learning and Intelligent Systems.
Today, Dr. Zehlike works as a senior researcher at Zalando, as an external lecturer at Humboldt University, and as a freelance consultant for ethical AI for German labor unions and their works councils. In addition to her scientific work, she is part of several initiatives that try to transfer scientific knowledge into practice and to the public. She is a regular news columnist, an invited expert for print media and radio, a frequent guest speaker at non-scientific events, and a contributor to the German AI standardization initiative.
Dr. Urs Müller is an experienced educator and author in the areas of business ethics, strategy, and change management. He truly enjoys the opportunity and privilege to regularly discuss with executives the dilemmas that they really face in their daily life. Urs currently serves as associate professor of practice at SDA Bocconi and as affiliate program director at ESMT Berlin.
After his studies of German literature, philosophy, and art history at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and at the Université de Fribourg, Urs taught at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, at the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika (Torun/Poland) and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA).