IBM Research

Francesca Rossi is an IBM fellow, the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader, and a Distinguished Research Staff Member at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab. She has been a professor of computer science at the University of Padova for 20 years before joining IBM.

Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behaviour of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. On these topics, she has published over 200 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters.

She is a fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI) and of the European one (EurAI). She has been president of IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI), an executive councillor of AAAI, and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of AI Research. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute (Cambridge, USA) and a deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (Cambridge, UK). She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI, where she represents IBM as one of the founding partners. She is a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI
and the general chair of the AAAI 2020 conference. She co-leads the internal IBM AI Ethics board.