Andrew McStay is Professor of Digital Life at Bangor University, UK. His most recent book, Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media, examines the impact of technologies that make use of data about affective and emotional life. Director of The Emotional AI Lab, current projects include cross-cultural social analysis of emotional AI in UK and Japan. Non-academic work includes IEEE membership (P7000/7014) and ongoing advising roles for start-ups, NGOs and policy bodies. He has also appeared and made submissions to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on the right to privacy in the digital age, the UK House of Lords AI Inquiry and the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport Inquiry on emotion, news and reality media.
Rebecca is a PhD candidate in Machine Ethics, and consultant in Ethical AI at Oxford Brookes University, Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence. Her PhD research is entitled 'Autonomous Moral Artificial Intelligence', and as a consultant she specialises in looking at developing practical approaches to embedding ethics in AI Products.
Her background is primarily philosophy. She completed her BA, then MA in philosophy at The University of Nottingham in 2010, before working in analytics for several different industries. As an undergraduate she had a keen interest in logic, metametaphysics, and the topic of consciousness, spurring her to come back into academia in 2017 to undertake a further qualification in psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, before embarking on her PhD.
She hopes she can combine her diverse interests to solving the challenge of creating moral machines.
In her spare time she can be found playing computer games, running, or trying to explore the world.
