Avoiding Bias in AI

During her academic career, Virginia Richter has been a Visiting Fellow at the KIASH, University of Kent at Canterbury (2004), Visiting Scholar at the University of Leeds (2006), Visiting Professor in English at the University of Göttingen and in Comparative Literature at the University of Munich as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the IASH, University of Edinburgh (2018). At the University of Bern, she was Head of the Department of English (2008-10 and 2019-2021), President of the Institute of Advanced Study (IASH) and its interdisciplinary Graduate School (2010-12 and 2014-15), and Vice Dean (2012-14). She was Dean of the Humanities from 2014-17. She is also President of the Forum für Universität und Gesellschaft (FUG), dedicated to furthering the dialogue between the university and society.Her research interests include Victorian and modernist literature and culture, literature and science, literary animal studies, and the beach in modern literature.

Gülser led the landmark 2019 study "I’d Blush if I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills in Education" which found widespread inadvertent gender bias in the most popular artificial intelligence tools for consumers and business. This report sparked a global conversation with the technology sector, culminating in a keynote address at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon, the largest global technology conference and interviews with more than 600 media outlets around the world, - including the BBC, CNN, CBS, NYT, The Guardian, Forbes, Time.

Prior to joining UNESCO, Gülser was the CEO of a global development consulting company (ECI Consulting, Inc.) based in Ottawa, Canada. In that capacity, she led development projects in over 30 countries. In parallel, she taught graduate seminars at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.

Gülser graduated from Robert College and Bogazici University in Turkey. She holds graduate degrees from the College of Europe, Belgium and Carleton University, Canada as well as post-graduate degrees from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, USA. She speaks Turkish, English and French.

She is a TED and international keynote speaker and a member of Women Executives on Boards and Extraordinary Women on Boards.

She studied pharmacy at the Complutense University of Madrid (2012), and trained at the Careggi University Hospital, Florence. She conducted pharmaceutical research and development at Synovo GmbH (2012-2018), being the project research leader of the European-funded project VISION, and the responsible person for the company’s orphan drugs. She undertook a Master in Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance by the University of Alcala and conducted the master thesis at the Medical School Twente (2018), Eschende. She gained her doctoral degree in pharmacoepidemiology at ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Prof. Andrea M. Burden (2022). Her doctoral research focussed on developing real-world evidence on immune mediated diseases, with attention to obesity and sex. She is the founder of Wall of Scientists, awarded the 2022 ETH Diversity Award.

Berna is a physician scientist, who is active as a clinician since 2013. She completed her training as a medical oncologist in 2018. Her focus is precision oncology and immunotherapy and she is studying the impact of sex and gender on cancer risk and patient outcome. In fact, although sex is one of the most important factors influencing disease risk and response to treatment, the patient’s sex is usually not taken into account in clinical decision making. The approximately 10% higher body fat, greater plasma volume and organ perfusion found in women affects pharmacokinetics, especially the distribution and onset of drug action resulting in a higher female susceptibility to the toxicity of different types of drugs.
Berna therefore thinks that sex, besides age, race and organ function is an independent modulator of drug efficacy and toxicity and merits consideration for individualization of treatments. She is interested in developing sex-dependent dosing of treatment schemes and cancer prevention approaches.

During more than six years of PhD and postdoctoral research, she focused on applying AI to ophthalmology and perimetry data. For her translational research she has been granted a BRIDGE proof-of-concept grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNCF). She has published multiple journal articles with leading clinicians and perimetry experts and presented her innovations at high-caliber scientific conferences such as the annual meetings of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) and the International Perimetry Society (PIS). Her startup PeriVision was awarded EUR 1.5M along with specific coaching at the prestigious 2021 European EIT Wild Card challenge (news Startup Ticker / ARTORG Center).