Rise25

Cansu Canca is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab, one of the first initiatives focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on AI ethics. She is also the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and a Research Associate Professor in Philosophy at Northeastern University. With her team of computer scientists and philosophers, she provides hands-on, research based consulting in integrating ethics into AI innovation and implementing responsible AI strategy for organizations.

Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards and to Fortune 500 companies. She works with World Economic Forum and with the UN and the INTERPOL in developing guidelines for law enforcement, investors, and companies for responsible AI innovation.

Cansu primarily works on ethics of technology, having previously worked extensively on ethics and health as a faculty member at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the WHO.

Angela Lungati is a technologist, community builder, and open-source software advocate passionate about building and using appropriate technology tools to impact the lives of marginalized groups. She has over ten years of experience in software development, global community engagement, and non-profit organizational management.

She is the Executive Director at Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company that helps communities quickly collect and share information that enables them to raise voices, inform decisions and influence change.

She sits on the Board of Directors for Creative Commons and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. She’s also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Data Equity, and co-founder of AkiraChix, a non-profit organization that nurtures generations of women who use technology to develop innovations and solutions for Africa. She was also recently named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2024.

Elaine O. Nsoesie is an Associate Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. She uses data and technology to advance global health equity. She led the Racial Data Tracker project at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research which aimed to collect, analyze, and disseminate publicly available racial data that points to the structural nature of racism. She also served as a program lead and a senior advisor to the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program at the National Institutes of Health. She is the founder of Rethe – an initiative that aims to increase representation of Africans in scientific research publications. She is on the advisory boards of Data Science Africa and Data Scientists Network – organizations working to build data science capacity in Africa.

Desmond Patton studies the impact social media has on well-being, mental health, trauma, violence and grief for youth and adults of color. He leverages social work thinking, data science, qualitative methods, and community partnerships to develop strategies to support digital grief and trauma and reduce on and offline gun-related violence.

Divya Siddarth is the executive director and co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, which is developing and applying new governance models for artificial intelligence. She believes that transformative technologies will only advance the “public good” if we creatively involve the public, and that collective intelligence is a powerful tool for making AI better. To that end, Collective Intelligence has worked with partners such as the Taiwanese Digital Ministry, the UK AI Safety Institute, ITS Rio, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Creative Commons on designing “alignment assemblies” – early experiments in demonstrating how the broader public can effectively co-create and improve powerful AI models.

Before founding CIP, Divya was Microsoft’s Office of the CTO’s political economist and social technologist. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Computational Decision Analysis, and is pursuing a DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute.