The organizers are a group of researchers passionate about the intersection of technology and policy design. Our core areas of expertise include HCI and service design (Junginger, Yang, Zimmerman), technology public policy and ethics (Gilbert, Jackson, Wong), and legal design and design in policy making and policy implementation (Hagan, Junginger).
Contact organizers: Qian Yang (qianyang@cornell.edu) and John Zimmerman (johnz@cs.cmu.edu)
Thomas Krendl Gilbert is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative. His research focuses on the emerging political economy of autonomous AI systems, including their technical development, moral significance, and implications for public policy. His recent work investigates how specific machine learning procedures (e.g., reinforcement learning) reframe classical ethical questions and recall the foundations of democratic political philosophy, namely the significance of popular sovereignty and dissent for resolving normative uncertainty and modeling human preferences. His work derives concrete implications for the design of AI systems that are fair for distinct subpopulations, safe when enmeshed with institutional practices, and accountable to public concerns, including medium-term applications like automated vehicles. Dr. Gilbert served as the inaugural Law and Society Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He is also a research affiliate with the Center for Human-Compatible AI, and co-founder of GEESE.
Margaret Hagan is the Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab and a lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school). She is a lawyer, and holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a DPhil from Queen’s University Belfast, an M.A. from Central European University, and an A.B. from University of Chicago. She specializes in the application of human-centered design to the legal system, including the development of new public interest technology, legal visuals, and policy design. Her research and teaching focuses on the development and evaluation of new interventions to make the legal system more accessible. Professor Hagan has lead workshops, including the “Law + Design =” summit at the Stanford Law School in 2017 that train legal professionals in the design process in order to produce client-focused legal design innovation. In addition, Professor Hagan teaches a series of project-based legal design classes, with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services.
Steven J. Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science and Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of scientific collaboration, technology ethics law and policy, democratic governance, and computational sustainability. More specifically, he studies how people organize, fight, and work together around collective projects of all sorts in which technology plays a central role. He also studies how infrastructure – social and material forms foundational to other kinds of human action – gets built, stabilized, and sometimes undone. This brings him regularly into worlds of policy, organizational or institutional analysis, and occasionally into design. He spends much of his time doing ethnographic, legal and sometimes historiographic research, where he studies how shifting policies, emerging technologies, and cultural innovation meet complex and historically layered fields of practice. He thinks a lot about governance – how order is produced and maintained in complex sociotechnical systems; time – how we experience, organize, design, and work around the flows and patterns that shape and define individual and collective activity in the world; and breakdown, maintenance and repair, as crucial sites of inequality, power, and ethics in complex sociotechnical systems.
Sabine Junginger is a faculty at Lucerne School of Art and Design. Professor Junginger’s research argues that taking policy-making and policy implementation as problems of design and as activities of design is critical for the success of policy innovation in the digital age. She has explored bringing product and service design activities to policy innovation, such as identifying policy needs via future-oriented envisioning, and iteratively prototyping policies and evaluating outcomes. More broadly, Professor Junginger’s core expertise is in the principles, methods and processes of human-centred design, with a focus on design theories and design practices relevant to public and private organizations. At LUASA, Prof. Dr. Junginger heads the Competence Centre for Design and Management and co-leads the focus area Organizations, HR and Leadership for the LUASA-wide Interdisciplinary Theme Cluster (ITC) Digital Transformation of the Working World.
Richmond Wong is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research seeks to understand how different forms of action can create values change and ethical outcomes in technology design, including: new design practices, worker and community-led actions, organizational practices, and law and policy. Recent projects include studying the technology workers’ practices related to ethics, and how companies have responded to new data protection laws. In addition to studying existing practices in these areas, he creates new activities and tools to help technology practitioners, users, and other stakeholders discuss and reflect on the social values and ethical issues related to technology.
Qian Yang is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science, with additional graduate field appointment in Computer Science. Professor Yang is a human-AI interaction designer and researcher. Her research investigates how to bring human-centered thinking to bear on evermore complex AI systems. For example, her clinical decision support system design aided cardiology teams in better selecting artificial heart implant candidates. Her recent work focuses on designing societal-level-scale AI systems, such as GPT-3 and the natural language generation applications it powers, pervasive sensing devices and AIs as clinical decision support systems, and autonomous vehicles and their collective interactions with other road users. By designing such systems first hand, Yang creates new design methods, processes, and tools that help HCI practitioners to better harness large-scale AI as design material while accounting for its unintended consequences.
John Zimmerman is the Tang Family Professor of AI and HCI at HCI Institute within Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He researches and designs human-AI interaction, human-robot interaction, and methods of innovating AI products and services. For more than twenty years, Professor Zimmerman has designed novel, intelligent systems ranging from one of the first TV show recommenders to a crowd-sourced, transit arrival system to a decision support tool for implanting mechanical hearts to a system that keeps parents from forgetting to pick up their children. He has published more than 150 papers and is a member of the ACM CHI Academy. He teaches courses in service design, lean startup, and the design of AI products and services. While working for Philips, he invented the way everyone scrolls on their smartphone.