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 Digital Studies Center (DiSC), a multidisciplinary research hub that explores the intersection of digital technologies and the diverse disciplines of the Rutgers-Camden College of Arts and Sciences. The lab is also affiliated with 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 Partners: The AI Ethics Lab partners with international leaders to produce academic research, including All Tech is Human, the Technical University of Munich in Germany, and Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

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.