- PhD Student
Alva Markelius is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory (AFAR) under the supervision of Professor Hatice Gunes. She is also recipient of Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ award 2024, committee chair of the Centre for Human Inspired AI Early Career Community and student steward for Better Images of AI.
Her main research interests are the ethics of social AI and robotics, specifically in the intersection of embodied robotics and large language models. She is also interested in embodied cognition, affect and emotion, gender and intersectionality, global AI narratives and AI hype.
She obtained her MSt degree in AI Ethics & Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge while working as a research engineer at the DICE - lab at the Institution for Applied IT, University of Gothenburg. She received her bachelor degree in cognitive science at the University of Gothenburg and Seoul National University where she specialised in AI and robotics.
Themes
Publications
Markelius, A. (2024). An Empirical Design Justice Approach to Identifying Ethical Considerations in the Intersection of Large Language Models and Social Robotics. In Oxford Intersections: AI in Society. Ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Rutar, D., Cheke, L. G., Hernández-Orallo, J., Markelius, A., & Schellaert, W. (2024). General Interaction Battery: Simple Object Navigation and Affordances (Gibsona). Available at SSRN 4924246. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4924246
Vivas, A. B., Estévez, A. F., Khan, I., Roldán-Tapia, L., Markelius, A., Nielsen, S., & Lowe, R. (2024). DigiDOP: A framework for applying digital technology to the Differential Outcomes Procedure (DOP) for cognitive interventions in persons with neurocognitive disorders. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105838. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105838
Markelius, A., Wright, C., Kuiper, J., Delille, N., Kuo, Y.T. (2024) The Mechanisms of AI Hype and its Planetary and Social Costs, Topical Collection on The Ethical Implications of AI Hype: Examining the overinflation and misrepresentation of AI capabilities and performance, Springer Nature AI & Ethics: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00461-2
Markelius, A., Sjöberg, S., Bergström, M., Ravandi, B.S., Vivas, A.B., Khan, I., Lowe, R.: (2023), Differential Outcomes
Training of Visuospatial Memory: A Gamified Approach Using a Socially Assistive Robot. International Journal of Social Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01083-0
Markelius, A., Sjöberg, S., Lemhauori, Z., Cohen, L., Bergström, M., Lowe, R., Cañamero, L., (2023), A Human-Robot Mutual Learning System with Affect-Grounded Language Acquisition and Differential Outcomes Training. International Conference on Social Robotics 2023. Finalist for Best Paper Award. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8718-4_10
Chan, A., Salganik, R., Markelius, A., Pang, C., Rajkumar, N., Krasheninnikov, D., ... & Maharaj, T. (2023, June). Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 651-666). https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594033
