Keynotes

Shannon Vallor

University of Edinburgh

Professor Shannon Vallor serves as Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and is Programme Director for EFI’s MSc in Data and AI Ethics. She holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy.

Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020.

She is the author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016).

She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics. She is also Principal Investigator and Co-Director (with Professor Ewa Luger) of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Ruha Benjamin

Princeton university

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity.

She is author of four books, including Imagination: A Manifesto(Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press 2022), winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019), winner of the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019).

Professor Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program.

She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study.

In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and, in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award.