Working Group
Working Group Agenda, December 10
Working Group Agenda, December 11
Working Group Members
Invited Participants
Caesar Atuire
Dr. Atuire is a philosopher and bioethicist based at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Ghana, Legon. He is a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford (Hillary and Trinity terms 2020). He is also a member of the lead team of the NYU-UG Training Programme in Research Ethics and a founding member of the Ghana Research Ethics Consortium. Atuire’s philosophical research interests and publications are on the African and global sources of normative thinking. He has carried out research on the frameworks informing attitudes towards mental disorder and suicide in Ghana.
Abby Carney
Abby Carney is a freelance writer and journalist in East Harlem by way of Austin, by way of Berlin, by way of Atlanta. She’s written features, covered breaking news, interviewed chefs and pop stars, reviewed cocktail bars and restaurants, and once upon a time penned a bi-weekly dating column—“Abby Dates Austin.” Previously the editor of the food magazine Edible Queens, and a guest editor at Narratively, she’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Texas Monthly, Glamour, and many other publications. Her latest work was a feature in The Guardian on the medicalization of loneliness, made possible through a grant from Columbia Journalism School.
Karina Caro
Karina Caro is an assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC), Ensenada Campus, where she directs the Technology for Social Good Research Lab (Tech4Good Lab). Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, accessibility, and videogames for health. Her research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating technology to support the cognitive and motor development of children with neurodevelopmental and genetic disorders such as autism, Down syndrome, and cerebral palsy.
Annamaria Carusi
Annamaria Carusi is Director of Inter-Change Research and Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Her work focuses on social and cultural aspects of the biosciences and life sciences, with the aim of improving collaborations across disciplines and across sectors. She is leading ongoing research projects on the science/regulation interface in the chemicals domain; on research cultures in post-graduate training; and on the introduction of artificial intelligence into clinical settings. For more information see: https://inter-changeresearch.com/our-team/annamaria
Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival starring Amy Adams. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
Giulia De Togni
Dr Giulia De Togni is an anthropologist specialising in Japanese studies and a researcher in science, technology and society studies (STS). Her research focuses on risk, technology, ethics, health, and human rights. She is currently based at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society (University of Edinburgh) where she is supporting work on the Wellcome Trust Seed Award “AI and Health: Exploring Affect and Relationality Across Three Sites of Intelligence and Care” (May 2019 – January 2021). The project, led by Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley, investigates how AI is being used in different ways in health and social care: robotics in surgery, digital methods that help diagnose disease, and the use of socially assistive robotics (SARs) to support those who may be ill or frail at home. While such developments hold the promise of improving health and social care, they also raise social and ethical issues. The aim of Giulia’s research is to inform policy and help those involved in AI, health and social care to deal with such concerns.
Stephanie Dick
Stephanie Dick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the history of mathematics and computing in the twentieth century United States, with a particular interest in how different academic communities treated the computer as a scientific instrument and negotiated a place for it in their knowledge-making infrastructure. Her first book project documents transformations in the production and understanding of mathematical proof precipitated by the introduction of computing. She is also working on a history of computer memory, a history of early facial recognition software and a history of how academic computer science became a discipline.
Stephanie Dinkins
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.
James Dinneen
James Dinneen is a freelance journalist from Colorado, based in New York. His reporting on science, people, and the environment has appeared in Undark Magazine, Mongabay, Hakai Magazine, and OneZero among other publications. Read more of his work at his website or follow him on Twitter @jamesNESW.
Noémie Elhadad
Dr. Noémie Elhadad is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, affiliated with Computer Science and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Elhadad’s research interests are at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and medicine. She investigates ways in which observational clinical data (e.g., electronic health records) and patient-generated data (e.g., online health community discussions, mobile health data) can enhance access to relevant information for clinicians, patients, and health researchers alike and can ultimately impact healthcare and health of patients.
Gail Geller
Gail Geller, ScD, MHS, is the Berman Institute’s Director of Education Initiatives and a Professor in the Department of Medicine, with joint appointments in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Departments of Health, Behavior & Society and Health Policy & Management, and the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Sociology. Dr. Geller has been an active member of the ELSI (Ethical, Legal & Social Implications of Genetics) research community since its inception. For over 25 years, she has conducted empirical research – both quantitative and qualitative – on the ethical and social implications of genetic testing in the adult, pediatric and family contexts. Currently, she is Co-Principal Investigator of an NHGRI CEER (Center of Excellence in ELSI Research) designed to address the ELSI issues arising from the application of genomics to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.
Ariel M. Greenberg
Ariel M. Greenberg is a senior scientist in the Intelligent Systems Center of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL); assistant editor-in-chief of the APL Technical Digest; steering committee co-chair of the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction (SBP-BRiMS.org); and an instructor in APL’s Strategic Education Program. His research addresses topics in psychophysiology, computational social and cognitive-affective science, and ethics of autonomous systems.
Calvin Ho
Dr. Calvin Ho is Associate Professor with the Faculty of Law, and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics, at the University of Hong Kong. His research is primarily on the governance of health- and biomedical technologies, including human genome editing, human pluripotent stem cell research, and health technologies based on Artificial Intelligence and data analytics. He is an Ethics Board member of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and a member of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator Ethics Working Group of the World Health Organization.
Matthew L. Jones
Matthew Jones leads the Big Data and Science Studies Research Cluster at Columbia. He specializes in the history of science and technology, focusing on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012-13 and a Mellon New Directions fellow in 2012-15. With Chris Wiggins, he is finishing How Data Happened, to be published by Norton, that tells the story of the growth of data and machine learning, the ways it changed power, and asks what we should do now. His earlier works include The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 2006) and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (2016).
Patricia Kingori
Patricia Kingori, PhD, is a Wellcome Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. Patricia’s primary expertise lies in Sociology and her current research interests intersect the Sociology of Science and Medicine, and a critical examination of ethics in practice. This work has been supported through a range of funders, the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and the Research Council UK’s Grand Challenges Research Fund. Patricia’s current research focuses on areas of ambiguity and uncertainty in relation an array of different entities are considered real or fake.
Eugenia Kuyda
Eugenia Kuyda is a former journalist, producer, and editor turned entrepreneur. She received an MBA from the London School and is presently the CEO of, Luka Inc. Leading a small team of developers, Eugenia created the Replika app in 2015. While most people create bots that talk, Eugenia created a bot that listens. Replika is a digital friend with whom users can be vulnerable and talk about what really matters without being judged. Nearly 8 million people have created a Replika for themselves, and since the pandemic, active users have doubled their messages to the app from 50 to 100 daily. Eugenia recently led the addition of an augmented reality feature to Replika where users can pick out how their Replika looks and set them inside their home.
Joao Sedoc
Joao Sedoc is an assistant research professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Center for Speech Processing.
Sedoc’s research interests lie in conversational agents, hierarchical models, deep learning spectral clustering, spectral estimation of hidden markov models, and time series analysis.
Ilina Singh
Ilina Singh is Professor of Neuroscience & Society at the University of Oxford, where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Psychiatry and the Faculty of Philosophy (Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and Uehiro Centre). Her work examines the psychosocial and ethical implications of advances in biomedicine and neuroscience for young people and families and reflects a longstanding commitment to bringing the first-person experiences of children and young people into ethical evaluation, clinical decision-making and policy-making. Ilina has contributed to various scientific and policy groups, including the UK National Institutes of Clinical Excellence (NICE), US National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
Heather Smith
Heather is an immersive and interactive storytelling technology pioneer and visionary. She has always been motivated by the idea that ‘everyone has a story to tell,’ and thus wanted to create a system to capture those stories and archive history in a way that people can interact and engage with it. She created the concept of immersive interactive conversational video, combining hi-fidelity multi-scopic video with voice commands to deliver commercial grade natural conversation with an individual, whether it’s a life-sized video or on a mobile device. Prior to StoryFile, she was an experiential exhibition designer. She partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation and USC Institute for Creative Technologies to build her vision of replicating the emotional experience of having a conversation with a Holocaust Survivor without that survivor actually being present. She produced and led the project Dimensions in Testimony before moving on to start StoryFile.
Alastair van Heerden
Alastair van Heerden is a Research Director within the Human and Social Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). Since joining the HSRC he has had an interdisciplinary focus to his research combing both his interest in technology for development and public health. Alastair’s research aims to contribute locally-informed and context appropriate knowledge to this domain by helping to identify technologies that both address barriers and provide solutions to the challenges faced by low resource communities around the world. He has been involved in a number of ICT for development projects in South Africa aimed primarily at supporting families affected by the dual burden of HIV/AIDS and poverty.
Effy Vayena
Effy Vayena is a Professor of Bioethics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) and renowned expert at the intersection of medicine, data, and ethics. Her work focuses on important societal issues of data and technology as they relate to scientific progress and how it is or should be applied to public and personal health. Vayena is a leading expert in the dynamic and diverse field of health data and ethics, successfully leveraging her academic work and international network to promote a fruitful debate about the ethics of health in the digital age. She has previously worked with the Wellcome Trust, OECD, Commonwealth Fund, Chatham House, and academic institutions and governments around the world.
John Wilbanks
John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark, served as the first assistant director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks holds a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University and also studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah Zeavin received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018. She is a Lecturer at the UC, Berkeley, affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. Her first book The Distance Cure: A History of Tele-Therapy (forthcoming, MIT Press, 2021), is a transnational social history of therapies deployed beyond the classic consulting room. Starting with a reading of epistolary conventions and Freud’s treatments-by-mail, her book shows that tele-therapy, far from being a recent invention, is at least as old as psychoanalysis itself. Subsequent chapters demonstrate that psychotherapy has always operated through multiple communication technologies and media, including the letter, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, the earliest mainframe networks, home computing, and now mobile phones.