Francesca Rossi

Career

Rossi was a professor of computer science at the University of Padova for 20 years before joining IBM, where Rossi works at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab. IBM Research lists Rossi as an IBM Fellow and as IBM's Global Leader for Responsible AI and AI Governance. Rossi's IBM profile also lists patents on topics such as constrained decision-making with explanations and an operating system based on a dual system paradigm.¹

Rossi has served as president of both IJCAI and AAAI and as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Rossi chaired the AAAI conference in 2020 and the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society in 2023, and sits on that conference's steering committee.¹

Research

Rossi's research covers constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, collective decision making and AI value alignment, along with ethical questions in how AI systems are built and behave. Rossi has co-authored a book and edited 17 volumes, including conference proceedings, special journal issues and a handbook.¹

A recurring theme in Rossi's recent work is combining fast and slow modes of reasoning. "Thinking Fast and Slow in AI" (2020) proposed drawing on cognitive theories of human decision making, and a 2021 follow-up examined the role of metacognition in such systems. Later co-authored papers study the use of large language models in automated planning and scheduling, and Rossi's IBM profile lists an AAAI 2026 tutorial on SOFAI-LM, an architecture for reasoning systems built with language models.²³⁴¹

AI ethics and governance

Rossi has been a member of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on AI. Rossi is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute and of the board of the Partnership on AI, and co-chairs the Responsible AI working group of the Global Partnership on AI and the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures.¹

Work and contributions

• Thinking Fast and Slow in AI Published research

  Co-author of "Thinking Fast and Slow in AI" (2020), which proposes a research direction for AI inspired by cognitive theories of human decision making; the IBM Research profile also lists a 2026 AAAI tutorial on SOFAI-LM, a cognitive architecture for reasoning systems built with LLMs.²¹

Timeline

1. 2020Chaired the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.¹
2. Oct 2020Co-authored "Thinking Fast and Slow in AI".²
3. Oct 2021Co-authored a paper on the role of metacognition in fast-and-slow AI systems.³
4. 2023Chaired the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.¹
5. Jan 2024Co-authored a study of incorporating large language models in automated planning and scheduling.⁴
6. 2026Co-authored an AAAI 2026 tutorial on SOFAI-LM, a cognitive architecture for reasoning systems with language models.¹

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Professor of computer science (20 years), University of Padova¹

Honors and recognition

• AAAI Fellow · Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence¹
• EurAI Fellow · European Association for Artificial Intelligence¹

Where they work

• IBM 29 people in the wiki

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