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Northeastern grads Tess Buckley and Tracy Woods are both working to ensure artificial intelligence is used responsibly and for the good of humanity by big tech firms.
LONDON — Tess Buckley boarded a plane from Canada to a country and continent she had never before stepped foot on, carrying just a suitcase and a dream.
Three years later, she is living in London and fulfilling her ambition of being an artificial intelligence ethicist in her job with techUK, the sector’s trade association, where she is charged with helping to ensure the advanced technology is used with the right intentions.
Tracy Woods was already a senior figure at tech firm Cognizant when she started asking the same type of questions about the responsible use of AI. Like Buckley, she too looked to texts and lessons of the past, some dating back thousands of years, to help her pursue the answers to some very modern questions.
Buckley and Woods may have come from opposite corners of the globe and been at different stages of their careers but they ended up at the same place: Northeastern University’s philosophy and AI graduate program in London.
“I had never actually been to the U.K. In fact, I had never even been to Europe,” says Buckley, a 2022 Northeastern graduate. “I basically rocked up with my suitcase just to do this program and I’m really grateful I did. I was just like, ‘This is my calling — I’m going to mitigate the risks of AI. But if I am going to do that, I need to learn a little more.’”
Buckley is aware that her vocation to be on the front line of thinking about the moral use of AI is far from a conventional career path. “I knew I wanted to be an AI ethicist, that was what I had in my mind,” she says when asked what made her fly 3,500 miles from her home near Toronto to London.
“It seems a bit of a pretentious thing to say but, at the end of the day, I felt a real calling and I wanted to decrease the risks of emerging tech and to especially do that for marginalized communities.
“I truly believe that all people are good at their core. But I was concerned that this kind of innovation, that it could be going down a harmful route and I wanted to be a part of a wider community that was trying to shape it in a way that, yes, supported economic growth but also mitigated risk,” she says.
Buckley feels philosophy is needed when confronting questions about the kind of role AI should play in society because these are age-old conundrums faced by people for centuries. “AI and generative AI are great but they are not new issues,” she adds.
“They are just escalating issues that already exist. So this question of ‘Is this moral?’ — that has been discussed in philosophy since forever ago.”
Woods was head of AI and analytics consulting for Europe at Cognizant — a U.S. firm with 360,000 employees worldwide — when the COVID pandemic hit.
Suddenly with an abundance of spare time — Woods and her husband, Dinyar, do not have a television and instead love to play music, both together and in a cohort of big bands and orchestras — she turned her attention to how she could use the period wisely and decided to tackle the thorny subject of AI.
AI was not the first data and technology-related storm the British tech worker had found herself in during a storied career that has seen her previously work with Arts Council England, in the construction sector and for pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.
Seeing that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was going to create upheaval in how data was managed and governed when it came into force in 2018, Woods took it upon herself to undertake a qualification in information privacy. When clients started asking for advice on how to prepare themselves for GDPR’s impact, Woods became a woman in demand, with Cognizant eventually setting up a dedicated department to deal with the deluge of data compliance work.
Similarly, Woods says she knew she needed additional skills to understand how AI might pose some difficult questions for developers and businesses. “I saw AI was going to be very useful and I wanted to understand the implications, similar to GDPR and data privacy,” she says.
The class of 2023 graduate says Cognizant makes “every AI course imaginable” available to its staff but it was not so much the technical understanding that she was looking for but a handle on what AI’s “social impact” is likely to be.
After enrolling on the master’s, she found words like epistemology — the theory of knowledge — hard enough to pronounce never mind get to grips with. But after two years of part-time study, which she says involved “bloody hard work” mixed with a series of “deep” and fascinating conversations with classmates and lecturers, she emerged with her qualification from Northeastern.
In between starting and finishing her studies, Woods moved to become head of life sciences consulting at Cognizant, a field she believes AI’s positive impact in helping speed up the discovery of new drugs and health treatments will be “off the scale.”
But she admits there are some applications of AI that she is “a little uncomfortable about” and is now playing a part in ensuring Cognizant, part of the Nasdaq-100, and the sector as a whole consider how to use the frontier technology responsibly.
“I’m the pebble thrower — and then ripples happen,” she says. “I’ve done that throughout my career and my life in many different ways. In Cognizant, I threw the pebble when it came to GDPR. Now I am throwing the pebble in when it comes to responsible AI. I am not taking credit for everything we do there but I just know that I am one of the pebble-throwers.”
Those efforts have led to the establishment of an AI Responsibility Council within the company, with employees coming together to ensure the firm is being ethical in its own work.
“I guess I started it in terms of calling a couple of meetings … and asking, ‘What can we do here?’” recalls Woods. “I probably went to the first two meetings but I sat there and thought, ‘My work here is done.’ We had the legal people and compliance experts there and they were just doing it and are now reporting to the head of the U.K. business. I threw the pebble in and then those were the ripples.”
Those ripples are also being felt in the public square. Along with others, Woods helped found the workshop series “Conversations On AI,” which looks at the technology from different perspectives, including regulation attempts and its impact on the creative industries. Woods said she went to Rohit Gupta, the head of U.K. and Ireland for Cognizant, with the idea of bringing industry and academia closer together through the workshops and he backed it with funding support.
Her classmate Buckley was looking to make an impact of her own after graduation. She went straight into working for a data-analyzing startup before moving to techUK, an organization with a 1,000-strong membership, in January 2024 to be its program manager in digital ethics and AI safety.
“This is my calling — I’m going to mitigate the risks of AI.”Tess Buckley, Northeastern University graduate and AI ethicist
“This is my calling — I’m going to mitigate the risks of AI.”
It is a role that involves “spinning a lot of different plates,” she says, but that, as a result, comes with plenty of variety. “I like that every day is different here,” she adds. “Sometimes I’m at the AI Safety Institute [a U.K. government body] having a coffee in the morning and then I’m back at the office getting a brief together for speakers, and then I’m on a panel in the afternoon.”
August will mark the two-year anniversary of her transatlantic flight to start her new life in Britain, giving up family, comfort and familiarity to pursue a tech dream. Buckley says she has no regrets about stepping onto that plane.
“It has all been worth it and I am grateful for it,” she says. “Being an international student is a qualm in itself — it is such a beautiful thing to have your heart in two homes.
“It has been a really lovely journey so far. I’m continuing to practice gratitude every single day for the fact that three years ago I rocked up on this soil with the intention of becoming an AI ethicist; I did a master’s, did a specialized contract in data analytics and now I find myself in a role that I absolutely adore. I love going to work every day.”