Center for Cyber Social Dynamics Fellows

Kathryn Conrad

AI Ethics, Digital Literacy, AI and Education

Kathryn (Katie) Conrad is Professor of English and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty Fellow for Humanities Advancement. Her research interests include technology and Irish modernism, artificial intelligence, and surveillance studies. She is the author of A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education (Critical AI 1.2) abd co-editor of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse (2019), has published several articles and book chapters on technology and culture, and runs an occasional Substack blog, "Pandora’s Bot." She co-organized, with CriticalAI@Rutgers, “Critical AI Literacy in a Time of Chatbots: A Public Symposium for Educators, Writers, and Citizens”; has run sessions on critical AI literacy for KU and KState; and is on the board of advisors for Harvard metaLAB’s AI Pedagogy Project. She co-led, with Sean Kamperman, AI & Digital Literacy Summit for Educators (June 2023) and will co-lead the week-long AI & Digital Literacy Institute: Toward an Inclusive and Empowering Teaching Practice in June 2024 in conjunction with the National Humanities Center and the Hall Center for the Humanities and supported by the Hall Family Foundation.

Jack Horner

Software, Measuring, and Trust

Jack Horner is a retired software and systems engineer, and former profit-and-loss-center manager in a Fortune 500 systems integration and development company. His 40 years of development experience includes scientific supercomputing applications and tool development, command-and-control, sensor, flight software, satellite-based navigation, and enterprise systems software development. He has thirteen years of teaching introductory physics, math, philosophy, and computer science. He has 170 publications in refereed venues. His current research interests include automated theorem proving applications in mathematics, and characterizing the limits of software verification.

Denisa Kera

Philosophy, human-technology relationship, blockchain technologies

Denisa Kera is a philosopher and designer that experiments with various creative strategies of public engagement in emerging science and technology issues. She uses design methods (UX, critical design, design fiction, future scenarios, participatory design), ethnography and prototyping to research STS (Science, Technology and Society) issues. She spent the last decade as an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, Senior Lecturer of Future Design in Prague College, and most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Arizona State University. Currently, she is based in the BISITE group as a Marie Curie Research Fellow working on Distributed Ledger Technologies (blockchain).

Justin Mullins

Philosophy, Machine Learning, Trustworthy AI

Justin is a machine learning researcher and philosopher with a diverse academic background. His research interests include the foundations of machine learning, AI epistemology, and the development of trustworthy AI systems. He has a PhD in philosophy, focusing on the history of analytical philosophy, philosophy of science, and mathematical logic.

Petr Spelda

Machine learning, AI alignment, and Human-Tech relationship

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Security Studies, Charles University, Prague.

I am interested in safe machine learning and the means to achieve it. Most of my works deal with inductive inference in various learning frameworks. I tend to believe that the formal study of inductive inference is important for the safety of artificial intelligence.

I am writing a book on AI alignment and (social) preference learning.

I collaborate with Vit Stritecky, my colleague from Charles, and John Symons from The University of Kansas.

David Wesbrook

Law, Socical Dynamics, and Emerging Technologies

David A. Westbrook thinks and writes about the social and intellectual consequences of contemporary political economy. His work influences numerous disciplines, including law, economics, finance, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and design. He has spoken on six continents to academics, business and financial leaders, members of the security community, civil institutions and governments, often with the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department.