Greek-Australian professor, John Tasioulas, the first director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics in AI, is among the members of the Advisory Committee on AI headed by MIT Professor Konstantinos Daskalakis, which was appointed by the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
John Tasioulas is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Law at the University of Oxford’s School of Philosophy and the first Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Tasioulas was born in Australia, his parents having emigrated from Greece in the early 1960s.
On Artificial Intelligence (AI), Mr Tasioulas said that “AI is here to stay, so we need to escalate the level of debate around AI ethics and feed the broader democratic process, between citizens and legislators.”
Tasioulas served as Associate Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and as Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the same university (1998-2010), as Quain Professor of Law at the School of Law, University College London (2011-14) and as the first Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London (2014-2020). He holds visiting professorships at the Australian National University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the University of Melbourne.
Timos Sellis, who has also lived in Melbourne, is Director of the Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Centre. In the recent past he was a Research Fellow at Facebook (USA, 2020-22), and Professor and Director of the Data Science Research Institute at Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia, 2016-20).
Previously, Sellis served as a faculty member at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92), the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 1992-2013), and RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia, 2013-2016), while he was also the Director of the Information Systems Institute at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92). Likewise, he served as Director of Information Systems at the “Athena” Research Centre (2007-13).
Sellis has received the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI, 1990) given by the President of the United States to the most talented young investigators. He served as President of the National Research and Technology Council of Greece (2001-03). In 2009, he was awarded the title of IEEE Fellow, and in 2013, he was awarded the title of ACM Fellow for his contributions to research. In 2018, he received the IEEE TCDE Impact Award “for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research”.
The aim of the committee will be to prepare Greece for the developments that all kinds of applications of this technology will bring, in the direction of participatory resilience, competitiveness, sustainable development and prosperity.
