European University Institute Fellowship on AI for Madalina Busuioc
Madalina Busuioc, Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, has been awarded the prestigious Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship by the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.
This high distinction, the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, provides a framework for established academics with an international reputation to pursue their research at the EUI. Madalina is awarded the fellowship from November 2020 until August 2021 for her project on ‘Accountable Artificial Intelligence in the Administrative State’. The project is focused on the use of artificial intelligence algorithms in administrative settings in a European context.
Madalina Busuioc: “Algorithms are increasingly determinant in high-stakes scenarios from university admissions, visa applications to policing. A growing need to retool public accountability in the era of automation is emerging and questions of oversight and the regulation of artificial intelligence are at the forefront of such debates.”
Key themes for investigation of this project will include aspects of algorithmic transparency, safeguards on algorithmic decision-making in the public sector, technical challenges to securing accountability, as well as technical solutions that can help sustain accountability such as model explainability and interpretability – techniques geared at understanding the internal learning processes of ‘black-box’ machine learning (ML) models and extracting knowledge in human understandable terms. Madalina’s research on AI governance is a sub-part of her broader European Research Council (ERC) project.
Madalina Busuioc is Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, where she leads a large 5-year ERC grant of 1.44 million euro since 2017. Her work has been published in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals such as Public Administration Review, Governance, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), Public Administration, Journal of European Public Policy, among others. She is field editor of the Journal of Public Policy and serves on the editorial board of JPART.