Nkechinyere Ogbuagu completed her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and has four years of software engineering experience; building platforms and applications as a Backend Engineer. She is currently completing a Master of Computer Science,   Concentration in Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Ottawa and a Research Assistant at CRAiEDL. Nkechinyere’s work at CRAiEDL is largely motivated by the challenge of getting AI practitioners, specifically engineers, to own ethics as a critical component or requirement of their work. She aims to define a frame of thinking around Ethics in AI that can be easily adapted to current engineering practices.  She is working towards becoming a practitioner of AI herself and has carried out projects to hone her skills.

Nkechinyere suggests that Chappie, a movie set in South Africa, presents an interesting thesis that tackles a number of ethical considerations about the integration of general artificial intelligence and robots in society. The storyline is about a robot that learns to think and feel as humans do and is able to transfer its consciousness from its original “body” to another. It’s a movie that heavily anthropomorphizes robots and AI and calls into question our motives for AI.