Dr. Eleanor Drage

Eleanor is a Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge where she runs a €1.9 million AI ethics initiative. She created the world’s first free EU AI Act compliance tool from an academia-industry collaboration, supports journalists across the globe in reporting responsibly on AI, and is partnering with broadcaster Sandi Toksvig to create a ‘Wikipedia for Women’. She also runs interfaith and cross-cultural AI ethics initiatives with colleagues in the Middle East and Japan. As a distinguished member of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics and co-host of The Good Robot podcast, she has earned a global following. The podcast was adapted into a book for Bloomsbury Press, The Good Robot: Feminist Voices on the Future of Technology. Her ground breaking work debunking bad science in recruitment and policing AI tools and how AI scientists are represented in cinema has been covered by the BBC, Forbes, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Glamour Magazine and internationally.

She is renowned in the industry for her refreshing, engaging and accessible public speaking, regularly touted as “the highlight” of events, challenging “bland, cookie-cutter takes on AI” with messages that speak directly to people’s fears and hopes for AI. She is regularly interviewed on TV for BBC News and has appeared on radio debate shows including BBC4 Moral Maze. She is the co-host of the award-winning The Good Robot Podcast, which draws over 40,000 listeners by asking leading thinkers the question ‘what is good technology?’. She has worked with Google DeepMind, The Financial Times, The United Nations Data Science & Ethics Group, CNN, and BNP Paribas.

Her forthcoming book What If We Got AI Right? How to reject the apocalypse and build an ethical future, unravels the myths and fantasies that make AI what it is, and shows how AI could be imagined differently. Her first book, An Experience of the Impossible: The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s SF, explores the history of science fiction written by women, and the imaginative ways they think about humanity and technology in the future. She’s also the co-editor of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data and Intelligent Machines, and co-author of the forthcoming book Reprogram: Why Big Tech is Broken and How Feminism Can Transform It.

Eleanor was appointed Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.