Dr Edmond Awad

Assistant Professor Edmond Awad is on Secondment to the Uehiro Centre from the University of Exeter through May 2025.  Assistant Professor Awad is a Senior Research Fellow for the Uehiro Centre and it’s research project the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, and is jointly hosted by the Department of Psychiatry (Professor Ilina Singh’s Neurosec centre) with the Faculty of Philosophy.

Edmond Awad is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. He is also an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and a Founding Editorial Board member of the AI and Ethics Journal (Springer Nature). Before joining the University of Exeter, Edmond was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab (2017-2019). In 2016, Edmond led the design and development of Moral Machine,  a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 10 million users, who contributed their judgements on 100 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgments over 3 million charity dilemmas. Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Edmond has a bachelor degree (2007) in Informatics Engineering from Tishreen University (Syria), a master’s degree (2011) in Computing and Information Science and a PhD (2015) in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Khalifa University (UAE), and a master’s degree (2017) in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Edmond’s research interests are in the areas of AI, Ethics, Computational Social Science and Multi-agent Systems.