Olivia Hill-Cousins (she/her)

Olivia Hill-Cousins is an EPSRC-funded PhD student here at the University of Exeter as part of the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, where Olivia also organises ReproducibiliTea Exeter, a journal club primarily for PhD students and early career researchers interested in Open Science.

Olivia's research is supervised by Dr Joseph Sweetman, Dr Edmond Awad, Dr Cassandra Lowe, Professor Joanne Smith, and Dr Chengetai Charidza.

Olivia's research lies at an intersection between cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, focusing on how AI systems can be developed to make ethical decisions aligned with human moral cognition. Olivia is investigating the complexities of human moral judgements towards AI decision-making as a proxy for understanding whether developing AI ethics, based on human moral cognition, could provide a globally accepted solution to ensuring ethical AI behaviour across diverse contexts and applications. 

Specifically, Olivia is examining whether our fundamental "core" moral cognition - the basic processes underlying our judgements of others' moral behaviour - extends to evaluating the moral behaviour of AI systems in the same way we assess human behaviour. This work contributes to the field of Computational Ethics and the ongoing discourse surrounding responsible AI development, with implications for the design and assessment of ethical AI systems.