Speakers

Will Griffin is Chief Ethics Officer of Hypergiant, an enterprise AI company based in Austin, Texas. Will is the recipient of the 2020 IEEE Award for Distinguished Ethical Practices and the creator of Hypergiant's Top of Mind Ethics (TOME) framework, which won the Communitas Award for Excellence in AI Ethics. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.

Dr. Rodriguez is the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Innovation Center at MITRE labs and leads the AI Red Team for the Department of Defense. Being part of a not-for-profit in the public interest, Dr. Rodriguez works with a team that can look beyond the bottom line of any particular product or organization and focus on harnessing AI to help address national and global challenges. For the past twenty years, his research has explored how artificial intelligence and, in particular, Computer Vision can be used to help solve problems for a safer world.

Alice Xiang is the Head of the AI Ethics Office for Sony Group and the senior research scientist leading AI ethics at Sony AI. In these roles, Xiang leads teams of AI ethics researchers and practitioners who work closely with business units to develop more ethical AI solutions. Xiang also currently serves as a general chair for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, the premier multidisciplinary research conference on these topics. 

T. Leo Cao is a doctoral student in the School of Journalism and Media at UT Austin’s Moody College of Communication. His research examines the digitization of museum collections from the interdisciplinary perspectives of cultural policy research, digital heritage studies, and museum studies. As a graduate research assistant at the Technology & Information Policy Institute, he also investigates the use of camera systems by the public sector in the U.S., focusing on issues of privacy, governance, technology, data, and public engagement.

Chelsea Collier convenes people across sectors to focus on how technology can be applied to civic and social challenges. She is the Founder of  Digi.City, a forum for supporting the co-creation of smart(er) cities and more connected communities. She also serves as the editor-at-large for Smart Cities Connect, which provides news, networking, and educational opportunities in the area of smart cities. Collier is a University of Manchester (UK) Simon Industrial & Professional Fellow (2019), a Marshall Memorial Fellow (2018), and an  Eisenhower Fellow (2016). She is also the co-author of the Smart Cities Playbook and the creator of the Digi.City Smart(er) Cities Toolkit. 

Brandon Kroos is the business process officer at the City of Austin’s Equity Office. He directly supports the departments reporting under the “Government that Works for All” outcome area for the city, as well as departments under the “Economic Opportunity and Affordability” outcome area, providing equity consultation in the areas of Small and Minority Business Resources, Austin Convention Center, and Development Services.