Albertine Conversations: Building Ethical AI

Join Villa Albertine and CNTR to explore AI alignment, responsible governance, and keeping AI centered on human values.
About this Event

Albertine Conversations: Building Ethical AI

Event Details

• Date & Time: Monday, November 16, 2026 | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM EST
• Location: Pembroke Hall, Room 305

About the Talk

Join Villa Albertine and CNTR for an interdisciplinary conversation with French and American experts on AI alignment, exploring the ethical, technical, and governance challenges of increasingly autonomous AI systems and how to ensure technology remains accountable, transparent, and centered on human values.

As AI systems become increasingly capable and autonomous, questions about how they are designed, governed, and kept aligned with human values are becoming ever more urgent. This conversation explores AI alignment and the broader ethical, security, and technical challenges raised by rapidly evolving systems, from algorithmic bias, manipulation, privacy, and opaque decision-making to questions of transparency, accountability, and public trust. It will also examine the current and future risks posed by increasingly autonomous AI, the role of governance and regulation in addressing those risks, and the challenge of ensuring that powerful technologies remain under meaningful human control and support, rather than replace, human judgment.

Host/moderator:  

• Victor Ojewale is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Brown University, affiliated with the Center for Technological Responsibility. His research builds evaluation and audit infrastructure for large language models and the agents built on them, with a focus on moving evaluation out of the sandbox and toward the communities that actually use these systems. He has developed community-centered evaluation infrastructure for LLMs, multilingual functional evaluations, and measures of when agents should act versus defer, and has co-authored regulatory filings to NIST, NTIA, and the European Commission. He was previously a researcher with the Mozilla Open Source Audit Tooling Project. In his free time, he is currently learning French at Brown. He also excels at making complex AI concepts accessible to a broad audience. Through his Substack writing and LinkedIn posts, he translates nuanced, often abstract ideas into clear, engaging insights that are easy to understand.

Conversation Participants: 

• Suresh Venkatasubramanian directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) at Brown University’s Data Science Institute and serves as the Dean’s Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. A computer scientist by training, his research focuses on algorithmic fairness and the broader societal impacts of artificial intelligence. He previously served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden-Harris administration, where he helped co-author the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

• Lola Carbonell is co-founder, Secretary General, and Director of International Affairs at the General-Purpose AI Policy Lab (GPAI Policy Lab), a French research organization established in 2024. Based at Campus Cyber in Paris, the Lab focuses on national security and international cooperation in the development of frontier AI models, bridging the gap between cutting-edge technical research and the practical needs of French institutions. Carbonell also teaches at Sciences Po’s School of Public Affairs, where she focuses on the security challenges posed by advanced AI. Previously, she worked in the Europe Program at Institut Montaigne, a leading French public policy think tank. She holds a degree in political science from Sciences Po’s School of Research.

• Thomas Klein is an artificial intelligence expert and Director of Technology Strategy at Microsoft, where he advises organizations on the strategic adoption of AI, particularly in healthcare. He is the author of AI for Healthcare, which explore the deployment of AI in high-stakes environments while preserving human judgment. A graduate of Télécom Nancy and the University of Leicester, he pursued further executive education at MIT and Harvard. Previously, he served as a city councilor in Suresnes, France, with responsibility for Responsible Artificial Intelligence, leading initiatives to integrate AI into local public services. Based in the United States since 2024, he also serves on the board of French Tech Atlanta.