Dr. Cansu Canca challenges the view of AI ethics as mere compliance. Instead, she reveals how invisible infrastructures (AI-embedded spaces, algorithmic organizations, and market forces) are already determining how power is distributed and whether ethics shapes our future or gets priced out.

Moderated by Christian Williams of J.P. Morgan’s Startup Banking division, this session explores how AI startups are transforming industries—featuring founders and investors discussing responsible AI, funding dynamics, success factors, and emerging disruptors shaping the future of innovation.

Accompany co-founders Robert Krim and Scott Kirsner on a walking tour through Boston and Cambridge highlighting groundbreaking inventions and discoveries that shaped the world, celebrating the region’s enduring legacy as a global hub of AI innovation.

Rethinking Smart Cities: From Sensors to Solutions

When we hear “smart cities,” we often imagine sensors, data dashboards, and AI algorithms. But what if the smartest cities aren’t the ones with the most technology, but the ones that know how to experiment, learn, and adapt?

Join Nigel Jacob, co-founder of Boston’s groundbreaking Office of New Urban Mechanics, for a conversation about what it really means to build intelligent cities in the age of AI. Drawing from years of civic innovation work, Nigel will explore how cities can leverage digital tools to tackle urgent urban challenges: driving down housing costs, shaping climate futures, catalyzing thriving public spaces, reimagining mobility, centering youth voices, and cultivating a culture of innovation.

This isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. It’s about who gets to shape urban futures and who benefits from them. Cities can become learning organizations that test ideas quickly, learn from each experiment, and put residents at the center of every solution. You’ll discover how AI can help cities ask better questions, surface hidden patterns, and respond more dynamically to community needs.

Whether you’re curious about urban innovation, skeptical about smart city hype, or ready to reimagine how technology shapes our shared spaces, this conversation will challenge you to think differently about the future of where we live.

Nigel Jacob Emeritus Co-Chair, Boston Mayor’s Office of Urban Mechanics

Bio:
Nigel Jacob is a civic innovation leader, urban systems strategist, and human-centered technologist who has spent the last decade and a half reimagining how cities work—and who they should work for. As the co-founder and longtime co-chair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, he helped pioneer the idea of a “civic imagination lab” inside City Hall, building teams and projects that treated residents not as end users but as co-designers. His work there spa fellowships and leadership roles with institutions such as MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, Harvard Kennedy School, Northeastern University,nned digital services, public space, mobility, and community engagement, always with a bias toward experimentation, care, and equity. Along the way, he’s held and the Boston Society for Architecture, where he has pushed the fields of planning, design, and public policy to take democracy—and community power—seriously.

Today, Nigel is building Neighborhood.AI, a network of hyperlocal, community-governed AI agents designed to help communities track development, surface community knowledge, and negotiate more just futures. His work blends political economy, design justice, and generative AI into what he calls “liberation pragmatism”: using advanced tools not to optimize extraction, but to strengthen civic muscle, collective memory, and democratic control over land, data, and finance. A trained software engineer turned guerrilla political economist, Nigel moves easily between community meetings, foundation boardrooms, and speculative futures workshops—translating across worlds while staying accountable to the neighborhoods that raised the questions in the first place.

Designing AI Human Futures: Why ethics can’t be an afterthought

While AI is rapidly becoming a structural force shaping economies, institutions, and everyday life, AI ethics is still treated as a compliance layer applied after the fact. This Positive Turbulence talk argues that AI ethics is the foundation upon which new societal structures are already being built, quietly determining how power is distributed, risks are absorbed, and human autonomy and flourishing are preserved or eroded. The value of innovation lies not in speed or scale, but in its contribution to the human condition. That requires confronting what it means to be human in a technology-driven world and what it means to design a “good” society under conditions of uncertainty. Doing so demands a shift in focus from individual AI systems to the invisible infrastructures that govern behavior: AI-embedded physical spaces, algorithmically managed organizations, and market incentives that decide whether ethics shapes the future—or is priced out of it.

Dr. Cansu Canca, Founder, AI Ethics Lab & Director Responsible AI Practice Northeastern University

Bio:
Dr. Cansu Canca is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab, a pioneering initiative focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on AI ethics. She is also the Director of Responsible AI Practice and a Research Associate Professor at Northeastern University, with affiliations with the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. With her team of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars, she provides hands-on, research based consulting in integrating ethics analyses into AI innovation and implementing responsible AI governance and strategy for organizations.

Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She serves as an ethics and governance expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards and as an ethics and strategy advisor to Fortune 500 companies. She is an appointed member of the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on AI for Health to guide the ethical, responsible, and equitable use of AI in health across the WHO European Region. She works with World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance in developing guidelines and best practices for “Responsible AI Application and Transformation” and “Responsible AI Playbook for Investors”. She co-designed and co-developed the “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement” for UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL, serving as their AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant.

AI Startups Shaping the Future of Innovation Panel Discussion

Artificial intelligence is transforming industries at an unprecedented pace, and startups are leading this wave of innovation. This panel, moderated by Christian Williams of J.P. Morgan’s Startup Banking division, will feature founders and investors who are building and scaling AI ventures. The discussion will provide an overview of the AI startup landscape and explore the opportunities and challenges from the standpoints of both founders and funders. Gain an understanding of topics like how responsible AI development plays out in practice, AI startup success criteria, near and long-term emerging AI industry disruptors, and funding requirements— Draw on lessons learned that can be applied to your organization.

Christian Williams, VP of Startup Banking, J.P. Morgan

Bio:
Christian leads a dedicated team in providing comprehensive financial solutions tailored to the unique needs of pre-Series A tech startups, with particular expertise in supporting Boston’s emerging AI ecosystem.

Prior to JP Morgan, Christian founded a successful algorithm-based Fintech startup at the prestigious Harvard Innovation Lab, where he developed technology matching borrowers with lenders. This firsthand experience as an entrepreneur gave him a unique perspective on the challenges faced by startups, as well as the passion and drive required to turn innovative ideas into thriving businesses.

Christian brings this entrepreneurial spirit and is committed to providing startups with more than just banking services. He is a trusted advisor and partner, offering guidance and support throughout their growth journey. His deep involvement in the AI community—including serving as a judge for Harvard’s President Innovation Challenge with a focus on AI companies, and hosting panels on “AI in Fintech and Banking” and “AI in Biotech”—enables him to provide specialized insights to founders navigating this rapidly evolving space. By leveraging his extensive network, he connects startups with relevant resources, advisors, and industry experts, enabling them to thrive in the highly competitive tech ecosystem.

Artist-in-Residence

Yessica Herrera, our Artist in Residence, will be joining us to explore how AI can become a tool for human flourishing and augmented creativity. She’ll share insights on the social factors that shape success in creative industries and offer a cross-disciplinary perspective that bridges technical innovation, artistic practice, and long-term cultural impact.

Yessica Herrera, Scientist, The Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society at the University of Notre Dame

Bio:
Yessica is a scientist and artist working at the intersection of AI, creativity, and the arts. With advanced training in social complexity sciences, human behavior, and data science, her work explores how networks of people, institutions, and ideas influence visibility, opportunity, and success in creative fields.

Her research develops AI-assisted workflows for studying art ecosystems, cultural production, and creative labor at scale. She combines computational methods with curatorial and historical expertise to examine visibility, influence, and structural patterns across museum collections and artistic communities. Her work also applies AI tools to optimize creative workflows in design and media production, with a strong emphasis on ethical use and industry-ready outcomes.

Before joining the Lucy Family Institute at the University of Notre Dame, Yessica was a researcher at the Barabási Lab, where she advanced interdisciplinary research at the intersection of data science, art, and social complexity. Alongside her academic work, she is a dancer and visual artist with a professional background as a creative director and video producer, translating scientific insights into award-winning narratives for higher education and public audiences.

X-Factor

Jason Mohaghegh, Babson Professor of Comparative Literature & Philosopy

Bio:
Jason Mohaghegh is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. He has published ten books to date tracking movements of cutting-edge and futuristic thought across the globe, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, madness, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, technology, and apocalypse. His current work focuses on how the rising futuristic influences of virtual reality, megacities, and artificial intelligence are radically transforming society, culture, and human experience. Jason Mohaghegh is also the founder of the Future Studies Program, Editor of the Future’s Theory book series with Bloomsbury Press, and Faculty Lead of the Babson Generator’s AI Ethics and Society Lab.