Researcher Carme Torras, member of the new artificial intelligence advisory council created by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation

Researcher Carme Torras, a mathematician who is an expert in artificial intelligence and robots at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI-CSIC-UPC), has joined the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, created recently by the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. The Council is a consultative body, chaired by Minister Nadia Calviño, whose mission is to advise and provide independent recommendations on measures to adopt that ensure safe, ethical use of artificial intelligence.

The new body, comprised of 18 Spanish experts of the highest prestige in the international area in the subject, will contribute to finalising and implementing the Spanish National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.

The members of the Advisory Council will analyse the implications of these disruptive technologies in a range of areas, such as business, administration and the future of work, the protection of fundamental rights, data management, the fight against discrimination or the elimination of social gaps.

In addition, Carme Torras has been appointed vice-president of the Ethics Committee of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), a consultative body that advises the Presidency and the Governing Council of CSIC. Its mission is to safeguard the scientific and ethical integrity of research.

Carme Torras Carme Torras holds a PhD in in Computer Sciences and is a researcher at IRI-CSIC-UPC. She has applied biology-inspired models to perception, planning, reasoning, movement control and, above all, automatic learning in robots. She leads a research group on assistive and collaborative robotics, whose main project is the ERC Advanced Grant Clothilde on robotic manipulation of clothes. In addition, she is author of science-fiction novels, with which she seeks to promote an ethical discussion about the applications of new technologies. For this purpose, her novel The vestigial Heart (MIT Press) has associated teaching material for use in a course on “Ethics in Social Robotics and Artificial Intelligence”, which is taught in various universities in the USA, Australia and Europe.