Cansu Canca

Dr. Cansu Canca is a moral and political philosopher specializing in applied ethics, with expertise in AI ethics, technology ethics, and population-level bioethics. Canca holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and has contributed to the fields of resource allocation and human subject research, serving on the full-time faculty at University of Hong Kong Medical School and as an ethics researcher at Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization.

Canca founded the AI Ethics Lab, a research and practice hub that brings together computer scientists, legal scholars, designers, and philosophers to address complex questions in artificial intelligence. The Lab is among the first initiatives dedicated to advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on AI ethics. Canca developed the Puzzle-solving in Ethics (PiE) Model, a collaborative approach for integrating ethics into AI innovation, which informs the Institute for Experiential AI's Responsible AI framework. With her team, Canca provides research-based consulting on integrating ethics analyses into AI development and implementing responsible AI governance and strategy for organizations.

Canca serves as the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and as a Research Associate Professor in Philosophy at Northeastern University, with affiliations at the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business. She consults as an AI ethics and governance expert to the United Nations, collaborating with the UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and INTERPOL on the "Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement." Canca is a member of the World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance working groups, a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal "AI & Ethics," an ethics expert for EU- and NIH-funded research projects, and chairs the IEEE AI Experts Network Criteria Committee.

A two-time TEDx speaker, Canca has delivered more than 150 talks on AI ethics, including keynotes at Harvard Business School, the U.S. Department of Justice, and her TEDxCambridge talk "How to Solve AI's Ethical Puzzles." She serves on various advisory and editorial boards and advises Fortune 500 companies on ethical matters. Canca has been recognized among the "30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston" and the "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics," nominated for VentureBeat's "Women in AI" and the Responsible AI Institute's "Leadership in Responsible AI" awards, and acknowledged with Mozilla's Rise25 "Change Agent" award. She is also recognized as the first technology and AI ethicist in Turkey.