Sandra Wachter

Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute.

Early life and education Wachter grew up in Austria and studied law at the University of Vienna.

Research Her work covers legal and ethical issues associated with big data, artificial intelligence, algorithms and data protection. She believes that there needs to be a balance between technical innovation and personal control of information. Wachter was made a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in 2016. In this capacity she has evaluated the ethical and legal aspects of data science. She has argued that artificial intelligence should be more transparent and accountable, and that people have a "right to reasonable inferences". She has highlighted cases where opaque algorithms have become racist and sexist; such as discrimination in applications to St George's Hospital and Medical School in the 1970s and overestimations of black defendants reoffending when using the program COMPAS. She has looked at ways to audit artificial intelligence to tackle discrimination and promote fairness. In this capacity she has argued that Facebook should continue to use human moderators.

She has argued that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in need of reform, as despite attention being paid to the input stage, less time is spent on how the data is assessed. She believes that privacy must mean more than data protection, focussing on data evaluation and ways for people to control how information about them is stored and shared.

Working with Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell, Wachter suggested counterfactual explanations – statements of how different the world would be to result in a different outcome. When decisions are made by an algorithm it can be difficult for people to understand why they are being made, especially without revealing trade secrets about an algorithm. Counterfactual explanations would permit the interrogation of algorithms without the need to reveal secrets. The approach of using counterfactual explanations was adopted by Google on What If, a feature on TensorBoard, a Google Open Source web application that uses machine learning. a paper written by Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell, has been featured by the press Wachter is also a member of the World Economic Forum Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation, an affiliate at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a member of the European Commission Expert Group on Autonomous Cars. Additionally, she is a research fellow at the German Internet Institute.

Awards and honours ESRC IAA O²RB Excellence in Impact Awards 2021 2019 The Next Web Most influential people in AI in 2019 2019 Privacy Law Scholars Conference Junior Scholars Award 2019 Business Insider Nordic AI Trailblazer 2019 Business Insider UK Tech 100 2017 CognitionX AI Superhero Award