Catherine Régis

Director of Social Innovation and International Policy

Catherine Régis is a full professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal. Prior to joining IVADO’s management team, she also worked at the Faculty as Special Advisor and Associate Vice-Rector, Strategic Planning and Responsible Digital Innovation. She holds a Canada-CIFAR Chair in AI and Human Rights (Mila) and a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. She is an Associate Academic Member at Mila and a researcher at the Public Law Research Center of Université de Montréal (CRDP), the Montreal Centre for International Studies (CÉRIUM) and at Obvia.

Professor Régis is very active on the international scene. She is co-Chair of the ​​Working Group on Responsible AI for the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), which brings together 29 member states. She co-leads the Working Group on responsible Digital Innovation and AI of the international university alliance U7+, which includes over fifty universities worldwide. She has served as a member of the Working Group on Trustworthy AI from the OECD and is a Fellow of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Science Diplomacy Program (2022). She is Scientific Director of the Summer School on Responsible AI and Human Rights (an initiative of Mila and Université de Montréal), which welcomes an international cohort of students and professionals from several disciplines (law, ethics, international policy, machine learning, etc.). She contributed to the drafting of the Montreal Declaration for the responsible development of AI and is co-leader of the international working group  established by the Innovation Council  to produce recommendations on the regulation of AI, which will be presented to the Quebec government in January 2024.

Catherine Régis recently co-directed the production of “Missing links in AI Governance” (UNESCO Press, 2023); “AI & Citie: Risks, Applications and Governance” (UN-Habitat-Mila, 2022); “The Innovative University: Renewing the Role of Universities in the Digital Innovation and Artificial Ecosystem” (U7+, 2020); “Connecting the Dots (Expert Panel on Health Data Sharing”, Council of Canadian Academies, 2023); and “Human-Centered AI: a Multidisciplinary Perspective for Policy-Makers, Auditors and Users” (Routledge, forthcoming 2024). She has presented her work to institutions such as the World Health Organization, UNIDIR, UNESCO, the Alan Turing Institute, Massey College, the Aspen Ministers’ Forum, at events such as the AI Safety Summit and NeurIPS, and at more than 20 universities worldwide.