Dr Maria Perez Ortiz

Maria is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Centre at University College London. Previously she was a Senior Research Fellow in the same department and Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Sshe researches the intersection of AI and sustainability, spanning applications in the environmental and social domain, with a critical socio-technical-ecological perspective. One of her most recent pieces of work (named “Seasonal Arctic sea ice forecasting with probabilistic deep learning” and published in Nature Communications) is a collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey to create a deep learning system for predicting sea ice loss in the Arctic, for policy and conservation purposes.Maria is also currently working on bringing sustainability and responsible innovation topics to the computer science arena. She is part of a committee to improve education for sustainability at UCL and is program co-lead of the first MSc program on AI for Sustainable Development

Her work focuses on Responsible AI and covers many topics, such as transparency, ethics, accountability, privacy, fairness and human-AI interaction and AI Sustainability Challenges where her work revolves around creating predictive models for solving real-world global challenges. In the past, she has worked on biomedicine, agriculture, climate change, neuroscience and education challenges. She is the programme co-chair of the First Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence. The conference focuses on responsible collaboration and interaction between humans and intelligent machines in Amsterdam in June 2022, and she is organising the Special Issue on AI and Interaction Technologies for Social Sustainability at the Journal of Sustainability.

UCL was rated 2nd in the UK for research power in the Research Excellence Framework 2021, is ranked 8th in the 2022 QS World University Rankings, and there have been 30 Nobel Prize laureates amongst UCL’s alumni and current and former staff to date.