Rate My Professor Shannon Vallor

Professor Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in the Department of Philosophy within the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. She serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures and as Co-Director of the BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council. Professor Vallor joined the University of Edinburgh in 2020. Her research examines how emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, robotics, and data science, influence human moral character, habits, and practices, with a focus on the ethics of AI and robotics, data ethics, and applied virtue ethics. She advises policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI and data technologies. She is a standing member of the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and serves on the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Prior to her appointment at Edinburgh, she held positions at Santa Clara University, including as Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor and William J. Rewak Professor of Philosophy, and earlier roles at the University of San Francisco. She previously served as a Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google from 2018 to 2020. Professor Vallor is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024). She has received the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics, the 2022 Covey Award from the International Association of Computing and Philosophy, the University of Edinburgh’s 2024 Chancellor’s Award for Research, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.