Francesca Rossi is an Italian computer scientist working on artificial intelligence ethics. She is an IBM Fellow and IBM's AI Ethics Global Leader, co-chair (with Stuart Russell) of the OECD AI Experts Group, and a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Her work spans industrial responsible-AI programs and international AI governance.
Type: Individual (industry researcher, AI ethics) Affiliations: IBM Research (IBM Fellow; AI Ethics Global Leader); OECD AI Experts Group (co-chair, with Stuart Russell); University of Padova (on leave) Recognition: IBM Fellow; ACM Fellow; AAAI Fellow and former President (2022–2024); EurAI Fellow
Background
Rossi had a research career in constraint programming, preference reasoning, and multi-agent systems before her current focus on AI ethics. She joined IBM Research in 2015 and has since been one of the more visible industrial voices on AI ethics and responsible AI deployment. She served as AAAI President from 2022 to 2024 and has led institutional efforts to codify AI ethics principles. She is on leave from the University of Padova.
Her earlier academic work centered on constraint-based preference reasoning and soft constraints, with a corpus on preference reasoning and constraint satisfaction predating her 2015 move to IBM.
Roles
As IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader, Rossi leads the company's AI ethics work. She directed the development of IBM's AI ethics framework and the internal AI ethics board structure inside a major technology company.
She co-chairs the OECD AI Experts Group with Stuart Russell, a body responsible for shaping OECD guidance on the risks and benefits of advanced AI systems. In that role she shapes the multilateral framing of foundation-model governance and the policy recommendations used by OECD member states. The OECD framing she helps produce feeds into G7, EU, and national regulators constructing AI risk taxonomies (see G7 (Group of Seven)).
Rossi co-founded the Partnership on AI and has been active in IEEE's Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems.
Positions and statements
Rossi frames AI ethics as a socio-technical discipline that requires governance, transparency, accountability, and fairness mechanisms, not only technical alignment research. She advocates for standards co-produced by industry, governments, academia, and civil society rather than purely state-driven regulation.
In positioning, Rossi occupies a middle ground between the alignment and existential-risk community and the FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics) community, rather than a sharply positioned safety or ethics stance.
Publications and works
- OECD work on AI risks and benefits, produced via the AI Experts Group she co-chairs (see OECD — Assessing Potential Future AI Risks, Benefits, and Policy Imperatives)
- Building Trust in AI and numerous IBM-authored responsible-AI materials
- Academic corpus on preference reasoning and constraint satisfaction (pre-2015)
Relationships
- related: Stuart Russell — OECD AI Experts Group co-chair
- related: AI Safety Cases and Frameworks — OECD AI Principles and IBM's ethics framework feed this map
- related: G7 (Group of Seven) — OECD outputs frequently flow into G7 AI policy
- supports: industrial responsible-AI and ethics-by-design programs