Summit on Responsible AI and Cloud Infrastructure Marks Conclusion of Dr Tommaso Spinelli’s Chancellor’s Visiting Fellowship

Organised in coordination with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), this summit will take place at the Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester. Advancing Responsible AI Through Cloud Technology marks the concluding event of Dr Tommaso Spinelli’s Chancellor’s Visiting Fellowship and is jointly funded by MetroPolis and the Department for Computing and Mathematics.

As AI adoption accelerates across public services and research, the event highlights the critical  and often underestimated  role of cloud infrastructure, governance and economic models in shaping ethical outcomes. Rather than treating ethics solely as a matter of algorithms or datasets, the summit positions cloud choices as foundational to questions of fairness, accountability, privacy, sustainability and public trust.

The conference will explore how “cloud done right”  from secure‑by‑design architectures and equitable access to compute, to sustainable workload management and transparent governance — can support more ethical AI development and deployment across departments, agencies and research communities.

The summit is open exclusively to professionals working in the civil service, central government, local government and academia, creating a trusted space for cross‑sector dialogue and practical learning. The programme will include five keynote talks from leaders in government and academia, alongside two expert panels and applied case studies drawn from real‑world public sector and research environments.

Key thematic areas include:

• AI in the forthcoming National Cloud Strategy, positioning cloud as an enabler for emerging technologies
• MLOps ethics, including bias detection at scale and explainability in cloud‑native systems
• GreenOps as a route to more sustainable AI
• Accountability in multi‑cloud, hybrid and distributed AI systems
• Securing AI in the cloud, addressing emerging cyber‑physical risks
• Responsible AI‑as‑a‑Service and its governance implications

The programme also connects to ongoing work at the Manchester Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Data Research, reinforcing Manchester’s growing role as a hub for responsible digital innovation.

As the final milestone of Dr Spinelli’s Fellowship, the summit underscores MetroPolis’s role as a convener at the intersection of policy, practice and academic expertise.

To register for this upcoming event, please visit Eventbrite: Advancing Responsible AI Through Cloud Technology (Tuesday 2 June, 10:00–16:00).

The full agenda, keynote speakers and panellists will be announced shortly.