About
Brent Mittelstadt is a Senior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in data ethics at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and a member of the UK National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee. He is an ethicist focusing on auditing, interpretability, and ethical governance of complex algorithmic systems.
Brent also coordinates the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) research programme at the OII, which investigates ethical, legal, and technical aspects of AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies.
His research concerns primarily digital ethics in relation to algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, Big Data, and medical expert systems. Currently, he is examining the feasibility of ethical auditing of decision-making algorithms, and the development of standards and methods to ensure fairness, accountability, transparency, interpretability and group privacy in ‘black box’ algorithmic systems. His work has also recently crossed into the field of data protection and privacy law, in particular concerning the implications of the EU General Data Protection Regulation on the governance of AI and automated decision-making systems.
Previously, he has been part of the EPSRC’s PETRAS IoT Hub, to develop ethical guidelines for designing the health-related Internet of Things, and led research on the ‘Ethics of Biomedical Big Data’ project at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research examined the ethical implications of personal health monitoring devices, in particular how these devices introduce medical concerns into private spaces and undermine ‘internal goods’ of traditional medical relationships.
Research Interests
Data ethics, data protection law, artificial intelligence, machine learning, medical expert systems, Big Data, predictive analytics, profiling, technology governance, epistemology
