Alexandra Olteanu: Reframing Responsible AI through the Lenses of Rigor and Human Agency

CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public

Alexandra Olteanu

Microsoft Research

Reframing Responsible AI through the Lenses of Rigor and Human Agency

October 10, 2025

In this talk, I will first argue that by making the case e.g., for better documentation, for valid measurements and more principled evaluation practices, for appropriately interrogating underlying assumptions and claims, and for understanding impacts and limitations of AI systems, what responsible AI offers and asks for is greater scientific rigor. Second, by examining the design and behavior of increasingly anthropomorphic AI systems—along their far-reaching implications—I also argue that centering human agency as the foundational principle for developing AI responsibly better foregrounds critical issues related to e.g., control, consent, oversight, recourse or redress. Doing so would also further underscore why other key responsible AI principles remain crucial—e.g., we want privacy and fairness because we want to preserve human dignity and autonomy, we want transparency not for sake of transparency but to help uphold human agency.

Alexandra Olteanu is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Montreal, where she is part of the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) team, and an associate industry member at Mila. Her work routinely unpacks and challenges practices and assumptions made when designing, evaluating, deploying or talking about AI systems. Currently, her work is primarily related to 1) rigor in AI (with a focus on conceptual clarity, measurement, and evaluation), and 2) human agency (with a focus on anthropomorphic AI systems’ design and behavior). Before joining Microsoft Research, Alexandra was a Social Good Fellow at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, and she holds a PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Alexandra has co-organized tutorials/workshops at and has served as PC/SPC/AC for most major web, social media, and responsible AI conferences. She has served as the inaugural co-chair of the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics on the Web track @ The 2023 Web Conference, and as the 2024 Program co-chair for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (for which she has also been the longest serving steering committee member).