Intelligent Earth Seminar: Maria Perez Ortiz (UCL)

11 March 14:00
Seminar Room 1a, Doctoral Training Centre, 1-4 Keble Rd
img 20220416 wa0006

 

María Pérez-Ortiz is an Associate Professor at the UCL Centre for AI, where her research focuses on responsible AI for sustainability. Her work explores how AI can support decision-making in complex, high-stakes domains such as climate change and public policy, with particular interest in futures thinking, foresight, and the design of sustainable trajectories. She is a Senior Research Fellow affiliated with the UK Government and serves as Deputy UNESCO Chair in AI, contributing to international discussions on the governance and societal impact of AI. At UCL, she co-founded the MSc in AI for Sustainable Development, a programme dedicated to training the next generation of leaders at the intersection of AI, sustainability, and ethics.

Planet-Centered AI: Reorienting AI for Earth System Stewardship

 

This talk introduces Planet-Centered AI (PCAI), a research agenda and design philosophy that reorients AI toward Earth system integrity and resilience. PCAI treats socio-ecological dynamics and systemic risk as first-order design constraints, shifting AI from narrow prediction tasks toward foresight. It reframes AI as epistemic infrastructure: supporting scenario exploration, stress-testing interventions, and collective sensemaking under deep uncertainty. Through examples from reinforcement learning with Integrated Assessment Models and multi-agent simulations, I illustrate how computational foresight could help design climate mitigation pathways, reveal cooperation failures, and be used as a tool to explore preferable futures. The aim is not better prediction, but AI that supports responsible planetary stewardship.