Name: AI Ethics Lab at Rutgers University

Website: aiethicslab.rutgers.edu

Mission: The AI Ethics Lab is an international research initiative dedicated to exploring the ethical and legal implications of artificial intelligence throughout its lifecycle—from design and development to deployment, use, and monitoring.

Approach: The lab employs a Solutions Scholarship methodology, identifying moral challenges and crafting practical strategies to promote responsible technologies that advance the well-being of humanity and the environment. In this context, the lab’s researchers take a dual approach to AI policy, emphasizing both harm prevention (nonmaleficence) and promoting beneficial outcomes (beneficence) throughout the AI lifecycle. This balanced approach creates a less shame-based approach to policy (“thou shall not”) with positive psychology (“imagine if”) to capture humanity’s moral imagination.

Values: Through values-centered research, the lab investigates ways artificial intelligence can be anchored in core ethical principles, including human dignity, privacy, transparency, fairness, safety, and accountability.

Academic Affiliations: The AI Ethics Lab is housed within the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Rutgers-Camden, a program that supports courses and research exploring the ways human beings understand and give expression to the nature and meaning of reality, knowledge, life, self, societies, ethics, and values.

Research Collaborators: The AI Ethics Lab collaborates with international leaders to produce academic research, including 1791 Delegates in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; All Tech is Human, in New York, New York, USA; the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich, Germany; School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Center for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa; United Nations University Institute in Macau, China.

Projects: The AI Ethics Lab conducts research on various topics, including supporting the development of the Munich Convention on AI and Human Rights through the development of the AI & Human Rights Index.