Carla Hustedt

Carla Hustedt is the director of the “Centre for Digital Society” at the Mercator Foundation. Her work focuses on the impact of digitalization on democratic structures and questions of (in-)equality. Since the start of the program in 2021 she has developed and funded more than 25 projects with partners from civil society and science on issues such as AI-regulation, the design of a healthy digital public sphere, the digitization of the public sector and open innovation. Until April 2021 she was the head of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s “Ethics of Algorithms” project. In this position she led the development of the Algo.Rules, 9 rules for the ethical design of algorithmic systems and coordinated an interdisciplinary scientific alliance, the “AI Ethics Impact Group” in their development of an AI Ethics label. In 2019, she advised the AI Enquete Commission of the German Bundestag on the transparency of algorithmic systems. Carla Hustedt is a member of the advisory board of the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) and the initiative “SheTransformsIT for more women in tech. In 2021 Capital Magazin awarded her as one of Germany's "top 40 under 40" talents in the category "societal issues". In 2010 she founded the German-Ghanaian human rights organization “Boa Nnipa” – an organization that has provided education on sexual and reproductive health to more than 70.000 students in Ghana.