The Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Lab, at Ontario Tech University, is the research lab led by Canada Research Chair, Peter Lewis.
We are an interdisciplinary lab in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, exploring how to make the relationship between AI and society work better.
Embedding AI in society presents a complex mix of technical and social challenges, not the least of which is: as more decisions are delegated to AI systems that we cannot fully verify, understand, or control, when do people trust them?
Our approach is to work towards empowering people to make good trust decisions about intelligent machines of different sorts, in different contexts. How can we conceive of and build intelligent machines that people find justifiably worthy of their trust?
Our work draws on extensive experience in leading AI adoption projects in commercial and non-profit organizations across several sectors, as well as faculty research expertise in artificial intelligence, artificial life, trust, and computational self-awareness.
A major aim is to tackle the challenge of building intelligent machines that are reflective and socially sensitive. By doing this, we aim to build machines with the social intelligence required to act in more trustworthy ways, and the self-awareness to reason about and communicate their own trustworthiness.

Last week, Peter gave the inaugural talk for the Autonomic Computing and Self-Organization Systems (ACSOS) Seminar Series, hosted by the Translational Data Analytics Institute on The Ohio State University Campus.
Peter’s event delivered an engaging talk on Reflective Social Intelligence for Autonomous Agents. The session highlighted the importance of explicitly modeling social phenomena, concepts, and emergent dynamics within autonomous systems, such that said systems may become aware and act intentionally because of said knowledge.

This week Peter joined the second session of Barrie’s Community Conversation Series discussing Facial Matching technology.
Peter motivated conversation around where and when it may be appropriate to use AI technology within the police services. Asking:

A huge congratulations to Dr. Joelma Peixoto on winning the Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence Award!
The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (SGPS) established the Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence Award in 2019 to recognize postdoctoral fellows who have displayed excellence in research, professional development, and/or service during their appointment at Ontario Tech University.
Work or Study with Us!
We often have opportunities to join us, typically for PhD or MSc research, as a postdoctoral researcher, or as a software developer.
For a list of current opportunities, please visit the Opportunities page.