Professors Menna El-Assady and Bernhard Schölkopf elected for UN AI Scientific Panel

Professors Menna El-Assady and Bernhard Sch?lkopf are among the 40 experts selected for the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. Their election was confirmed by the Member States during the General Assembly on 12 February 2026. Established by the United Nations, this panel brings together leading scientists to assess the opportunities, risks, and societal impacts of artificial intelligence, providing evidence-based guidance to international policymakers.

Prof. Menna El-Assady heads the Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation (IVIA) Lab at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. Her research spans data analysis, visualisation, computational linguistics, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on designing interactive human-AI collaboration interfaces that support effective problem-solving and decision-making. She has worked closely with political science and linguistic scholars, contributing to platforms such as LingVis.io, and has co-founded and co-organised several international workshop series, including Vis4DH and VISxAI. Besides, Menna El-Assady is a core faculty member of the ETH AI Center and Design++ and a member of the AI Ethics and Policy Network. She is also an associated faculty member at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems and an ELLIS Scholar of the ETH Zurich Unit at the European Laboratory for Learning & Intelligent Systems.

Prof. Bernhard Sch?lkopf is a professor within the Institute for Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in T¨¹bingen, Germany, where he leads the Department of Empirical Inference. In addition, he is an honorary professor at the University of T¨¹bingen and Technische Universit?t Berlin and was founding chairman of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He is renowned for his work in machine learning and causal inference, exploring statistical regularities and the underlying causal structures in empirical data, with applications ranging from astronomy to computer vision. He has published influential work on causality, contributed to landmark AI texts, and has been involved in scientific collaborations spanning gravitational wave detection and exoplanet discovery. Sch?lkopf is recognised for applying machine learning across diverse fields while maintaining a commitment to ethical AI research.

The election of Menna El-Assady and Bernhard Sch?lkopf reflects their scientific leadership and the international recognition of their expertise. Their contributions are expected to be instrumental in shaping a safe, inclusive and evidence-based digital future.