Derek Leben
Derek Leben on Evaluating Fairness Metrics
Derek Leben
Keynote Speaker
Associate Teaching Professor of Ethics at the Tepper School of Business; President, Ethical Algorithms
Dr. Derek Leben delivers engaging talks on AI ethics that bring together ethical ideas with real-world impact. A skilled educator and speaker, Dr. Leben shows how classic ethical frameworks can be applied to new technologies, and how organizations can develop clear policies around the responsible use of new technologies.
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Any discussion about the responsible use of new technologies demands both technical knowledge and ethical reasoning. Dr. Derek Leben brings years of experience in ethical debate and analysis to help organizations deal with new ethical challenges. He has advised governments and Fortune 500 companies on their policies around new technologies, with an emphasis on clearly stating an organization’s ethical assumptions, what practices the organization accepts and rejects, and what sacrifices the organization is willing to make. In both classrooms and corporate education, Dr. Leben creates a forum for respectful debate, where leaders and future leaders explain and defend their ethics policies to critics.
Dr. Leben is the author of Ethics for Robots (Routledge, 2018) and AI Fairness (MIT Press, 2025), and teaches courses at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business at both the undergraduate and graduate level, such as “Ethics of Emerging Technology,” “Fairness in Business,” and “Ethics and AI.”
Featured Videos
Derek Leben
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Derek Leben
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Derek Leben
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Derek Leben
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Derek Leben
Derek Leben on Evaluating Fairness Metrics
Derek Leben’s Speech Topics
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Designing Policies for Responsible AI
AI has enormous potential to transform business at every level, but also brings significant ethical challenges. In response, regulators have been working hard to develop frameworks to assess and mitigate these challenges. While these regulations are being developed, it is up to companies to lead the way in developing their own policies and standards for what constitutes responsible practices around AI systems. This talk will explore the space of the ethical challenges posed by AI, map out policies which have been proposed as solutions, and evaluate these policies and regulations using normative ethical frameworks.
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Ethics and Emerging Technologies
New technologies transform the ways that companies deliver value to consumers, but they also raise important ethical challenges. These include: biometric and behavioral data collection, digital platforms, AI, and biotech. To manage the ethical risks posed by these technologies, we must view them through the lens of traditional ethical debates. Questions about scraping a person’s data to train AI models without consent and tracking website activity to market ads without consent are related to old questions about taking a person’s picture without consent. These raise fundamental questions about the very concepts of ownership and what it is to be a person. New risks, such as “harm to dignity,” are explored as an extension of these traditional concepts about personhood and control.
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Fairness in Business
Life isn’t fair… but it should be, and everybody wants it to be more fair. So what can companies to do make this happen? Beyond just compliance with the minimal legal standards, there are many steps that companies can take to promote fair practices, in domains such as price and wage setting, scheduling, hiring, resource management, and even logistics. But which fairness principles should companies use for these decisions? This talk will discuss some of the principles for fair distributions from ethics and welfare economics, and how these can be used by an organization to make responsible decisions around allocating costs and benefits to stakeholders.
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Business Ethics: Risks and Responsibilities
There are many business practices which are legal and profitable but not ethical, and corporate leaders must be able to defend their decisions around these practices to skeptical stakeholders. These practices include: informed consent, exploitation and deception, abuses of position and conflicts of interest, social and environmental impacts, competitive practices, fair wages and prices, and privacy. There are well-established laws around all of these practices, but laws often differ from region to region, and will always allow room for interpretation. Ultimately, leaders must be able to clearly state which practices would comply with or violate their ethical values. This requires using normative concepts and theories to justify a decision.
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