This two-part presentation will begin by advocating for the potential and effectiveness of incorporating computational methodologies into our study and understanding of ethics. We will highlight how employing computational techniques can enrich our comprehension of ethical constructs, both in human interactions and within artificial intelligence systems. In this context, an innovative methodology that brings computational principles to the forefront of ethical examination will be introduced, backed by a series of proof-of-concept studies demonstrating AI's capabilities in ethical decision-making, utilising participant-generated moral decision-making data. In the latter half, we will navigate the complexities of moral preferences across various nations - from classical ethical dilemmas such as the trolley problem and charity-related dilemmas, to more recent dilemmas introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. This segment seeks to illuminate the diversity of moral reasoning and the far-reaching implications of such differences in a globally connected world.

Edmond Awad is a Senior Research Fellow at The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at University of Oxford. Concurrently, Edmond is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. In addition, Edmond is an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Before joining the University of Exeter, Edmond was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab (2017-2019). In 2016, Edmond led the design and development of Moral Machine,  a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 10 million users, who contributed their judgements on 100 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgments over 3 million charity dilemmas. Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Edmond has a bachelor degree (2007) in Informatics Engineering from Tishreen University (Syria), a master’s degree (2011) in Computing and Information Science and a PhD (2015) in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Khalifa University (UAE), and a master’s degree (2017) in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Edmond’s research interests are in the areas of AI, Ethics, Computational Social Science and Multi-agent Systems.