How did your journey in AI start - what brought you to AI?
Like most people that did AI before 2010, I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I was in a bachelor of electrical engineering control theory and then I had a course in AI in 2001. I was immediately attracted to the field.
What is the biggest change you have observed in AI compared to when you entered the field at the start of your career?
That we can now call AI he AI. When I decided I want to do academia AI it was still the winter and expert systems was a bad word. People studied reasoning as part of theoretical computer science, so that is what I did. Now the AI as a active research field is a bit neglected, people hype on AI as innovation technology, but I can shout from the roof tops I am an AI researcher and people think I have a cool job (and I do ;))
What excites you about working in AI, and what are you working on right now?
I come from control theory, so for me AI is always about finding out ways for people to be relieved of doing jobs they would rather not do. My research area is collective reasoning and multi-agent systems. I am still very much in the “how to automate moral reasoning” problem, but I am also dabbling in ethical AI in a more broad sense. I just submitted a bunch of papers, the ambition is to complete a text book on AI Ethics by the end of the year.
How do you see the number of female researchers and professionals in AI grow? How do you involve yourself in initiatives to introduce more women to AI, and what initiatives can we make to inspire more women to pursue careers within AI?
The thing that I have seen works best is creating a shared resource of women or diversity AI professionals to improve their visibility, so there will no more the excuse “oh but I wanted the best and the best happened to be a man”. You choose “the best” from who you can think of, not from the complete list.
Why is it important for more women to get involved in AI?
Because we are 50% of all the humans. Why do we need another reason?
What advice would you like to give women who are pursuing their careers in AI? You belong here.
What advice do you have for organizations who wish to recruit and retain female researchers and professionals in AI?
If you have an all male team, do not just hire one token woman, throw her in the bullpen and call it done. You have not changed the work environment and you have thrown the pressure to change on one individual. Hire at least two or three at the same time so that they can support each other.
Who is your biggest role model within your field, and why?
Ah .. so many!
Melanie Mitchel who I have not met wrote this amazing AI book, that brought my AI mojo when I was done https://melaniemitchell.me/
Manuela Veloso who I met at this conference where there were so many empty talks (she was not asked to speak), but had so many insightful points about robotics today and hard AI problems. I learnt so much in 15 minutes. Virginia Dignum who does so much heavy lifting in politics AI...
What role can NORA take on to empower diversity and inclusion in AI in Norway?
Keep women visible. They will do the rest.
Marija Slavkovik is a professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her area of research is Artificial Intelligence (AI) with expertese in collective reasoning. Slavkovik is active in the AI subdisciplines of: multi-agent systems, machine ethics and computational social choice.
Slavkovik believes that the world can be improved by automating away the borring, repetitive and dangerous human tasks and that AI has a crutial role to play towards this goal. In AI, the big problem she hopes to solve is the efficient self-coordination of systems of artificial intelligent agents.
In machine ethics, Slavkovik is active in engineering machine ethics problems - How can we build autonomous systems and artificial agents that behave ethically? Want to know what is happening in machine ethics since it stopped being an SF-only topic? There is a tutorial for that. Slavkovik co-organised a Dagstuhl Seminar in 2019 on this topic. She is also one of the guest editors of the Special Issue on Ethics for Autonomous Systems of the AI Journal.
Slavkovik is the vice-chair of the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society and member of the informal advisory group on Ethical, Legal, Social Issues of CLAIRE. She is in the education committee of NORA, currently working on developing a national phd course on AI ethics.
In computational social choice and multi-agent syste, Slavkovik is particularly active in Judgment Aggregation. If you are wondering what this is there is a tutorial for that. Her new passion in this field is looking for ways to consider social network interaction of agents and what impact that can have on collective reasoning and decision-making, particularly in aggregation. For more on what social network analysis has to do with AI go here.
Slavkovik was the chair and host of the 16th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems EUMAS held December 6-7, 2018 in Bergen. Here are the proceedings. She is also in the board of EURAMAS.