AI: The Practice, the Promise and the Pitfalls - Balancing capability and human judgement

Online with Professor Sally Cripps

Hosted by Dr Marianne Broadbent

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from experimentation to embedded practice across social services, healthcare, and environmental management. This talk cuts through the hype to examine what AI is actually doing: powering predictive systems that forecast risk, triage patients, allocate resources, and monitor complex ecosystems — often at scale and at speed. Drawing on applied research, it distinguishes between systems that merely predict and those that attempt to reason under uncertainty and model cause and effect, highlighting where AI can genuinely strengthen policy and operational decision-making.

But capability is not the same as judgement. When predictive systems are deployed in high-stakes settings, risks emerge: confident error, hidden bias, misplaced trust, and the gradual displacement of professional discretion. As AI increasingly mediates who receives services, treatment, or protection, the question is not only technical but institutional: how do we harness computational power without eroding responsibility, accountability, and care? This talk offers a clear-eyed framework for integrating AI in ways that enhance — rather than diminish — human decision-making.

Sally Cripps is an internationally recognised scholar and leader in Bayesian Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In addition to her role as Director of Technology at the Human Technology Institute she is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Technology Sydney. Sally has held a number of leadership positions in ML and AI. She was co-founder and co-director of the University of Sydney’s Centre for Translation Data Science (CTDS), she was founder and Director of the Australian Research Council’s Industrial Transformation Training Centre (ARC ITTC) Data Analytics for Resources and Environments (DARE). Most recently Sally was Research Director of Analytics and Decision Science and Science Director of the Next Gen AI Training Programme in CSIRO’s Data61. She was also chair of the International Bayesian Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) section on Education and Research in practice. She has served as a board member for Climate Services for Agriculture in the Department of Water and the Environment and as a member of the Data Analytics Centre of NSW Health and Human Services Expert Working Group and the NSW Smart Cities Research & Academic Working Group.

Sally’s research focuses on the development of new foundational methods in AI to address global challenges. Her work has been published in the world’s most prestigious statistical and machine learning journals, such as, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association; Theory and methods, (JASA), Biometrika and Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (JCGS), Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AIStats). She has applied these methods to a diverse range of fields including social disadvantage, mental health, climate, minerals and the environment. In recognition of the quality of her research Sally was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship and a visiting scholar fellowship to the Alan Turing Institute in the UK.

Please join Sally for what promises to be an engaging and enlightening session.