David Leslie is the Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research at The Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at Queen Mary University of London. He previously taught at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, Yale’s programme in Ethics, Politics and Economics and at Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, where he received over a dozen teaching awards including the 2014 Stanley Hoffman Prize for Teaching Excellence.
David Leslie is the author of the UK Government’s official guidance on the responsible design and implementation of AI systems in the public sector, Understanding artificial intelligence ethics and safety (2019) and a principal co-author of Explaining decisions made with AI (2020), a co-badged guidance on AI explainability published by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office and The Alan Turing Institute. After serving as an elected member of the Bureau of the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI) (2021-2022), he was appointed, in 2022, as Specialist Advisor to the CoE’s Committee on AI where he has led the writing of its Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law Impact Assessment for AI (2024), which accompanies its AI Convention. He also serves on UNESCO’s High-Level Expert Group steering the implementation of its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
