Description

ABOUT THE WEBINAR
Machine learning (ML) raises issues of risk for corporate and commercial use. These risks include bias and hidden, sub-optimal assumptions relating to the data that is being fed and processed. ML can also lead to unexpected errors and harm. While the existing literature provides rich discussion of these issues, there are only emerging regulatory frameworks and soft law in the form of ethical principles to guide companies navigating this area of innovation. This seminar focuses on companies that deploy ML, rather than on producers of ML innovations, in order to chart a framework for guiding strategic corporate decisions in adopting ML. We explain that such a framework necessarily integrates corporate legal risks and their broader accountability to society. The navigation of ML innovations is not carried out within a ‘compliance landscape’ for companies, given that the laws and regulations governing corporate use of ML are yet emerging. Corporate deployment of ML is being scrutinised by the industry, stakeholders, and broader society as governance initiatives are being developed in a number of bottom-up quarters. We explain how companies should frame their strategic deployment of ML innovations within a ‘thick and broad’ paradigm of corporate responsibility that is inextricably connected to business-society relations.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Iris H-Y Chiu is Professor of Corporate Law and Financial Regulation at the University College London (UCL). She is Director of the UCL Centre of Ethics and Law and advances the public and stakeholder engagement of the Centre’s agenda in relation to a wide range of issues in relation to law, regulation, governance and ethics in business and finance. She has published extensively in the areas of corporate governance and financial regulation, including The Foundations and Anatomy of Shareholder Activism (2010), The Legal Framework for Internal Control in Banks and Financial Institutions (2015), Investment Management and Corporate Governance (2017), Banking Law and Regulation (2019), The Law and Governance of Decentralised Business Models (2020) and Regulating the Crypto-Economy (2021). She is a Research Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and a member of its Editorial Board. She has also been appointed as Senior Scholar at the European Central Bank’s Legal Research Programme (2020).

Ernest Lim is Professor at NUS Law. His research interests are comparative corporate law and governance, artificial intelligence, and private law. An award-winning researcher, he is the sole-author of three major monographs with Cambridge University Press: A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia (2019); Sustainability and Corporate Mechanisms in Asia (2020); and Social Enterprises in Asia: A New Legal Form (2022 forthcoming). He is also co-editor of the forthcoming The Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence. He obtained his LLB from NUS, and BCL and DPhil from Oxford. Prior to joining academia, he was a capital markets lawyer in the New York and Hong Kong offices of Davis Polk where he represented investment banks and Fortune 500 companies.