Lize Alberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Her research centres on building AI systems that understand and respect users’ capabilities and long-term goals, and support them in person-centred ways that foster autonomy, integration, and enduring self-determination.

She works in the VU's AI & Behaviour lab, and is also affiliated with the Network Institute and Hybrid Intelligence Centre. She holds a research associate position at the Unit for the Ethics of Technology at Stellenbosch University, and is associate editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements book series on AI Ethics & Society, in affiliation with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Lize has an interdisciplinary background spanning artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, behavioural psychology, analytic philosophy, social anthropology, and cognitive science. She obtained her DPhil in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, focusing on the ethics of human-AI social interaction. Her master’s applied principles from embodied cognition and cognitive linguistics to critically assess multi-modal grounded language learning approaches in AI.

During her doctorate, Lize worked at Google London as a Student Researcher on contextualising the alignment of social AI agents, laying the groundwork for the field now termed socioaffective alignment, and contributed to a Google DeepMind whitepaper on the ethics of advanced AI assistants.

• Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University | Stellenbosch | Research Fellow | 2023-06-01 - present

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