Program Leads and Distinguished Guest Faculty
Distinguished Guest Faculty
Colin Allen is the Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Danks is coauthor of Species of Mind and coeditor of Nature's Purposes and The Cognitive Animal. Allen's main areas of research concern the philosophical foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. He is particularly interested in the scientific study of cognition in nonhuman animals and computers, and he has published widely on topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence; he also focuses on several projects in the area of humanities computing. He is a faculty affiliate of the Digital Studies & Methods program, as well as of the Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh’s joint Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
David Danks is Professor of Data Science and Philosophy at University of California, San Diego and affiliate faculty in the department of Computer Science and Engineering. Previously, he was the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. While at CMU, he served as the Chief Ethicist of CMU’s Block Center for Technology & Society and co-director of CMU’s Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS). His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, using ideas, methods, and frameworks from each to advance the understanding of complex, interdisciplinary problems. He has explored the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI and robotics in transportation, healthcare, privacy, and security, and has developed multiple novel causal discovery algorithms for complex types of observational and experimental data.
Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) is a sociologist by training, and her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. Dr. Hanna has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna serves as a co-chair of Sociologists for Trans Justice and as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She has been featured in the Cal Academy of Sciences New Science exhibit, which highlights queer and trans scientists of color.
Julie Owono is an expert in digital rights and international technology law, and an advocate for business and human rights principles in the technology industry. She is the Executive Director of the Content Policy and Society Lab at Stanford University, as well as the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières, an organization which defends digital rights and access to the internet. She is also a member of Facebook’s Oversight Board; a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a member of UNESCO's Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG) for the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence; a Member of the Expert Committee on Digital Inclusion of the World Benchmarking Alliance; and a Civil Society member of the Global Network Initiative's Board. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris.
Program Leads
Brian Patrick Green
Director, Technology Ethics at the Marrkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
Brian Patrick Green is the director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He teaches AI ethics, and previously taught other engineering ethics courses, in Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Engineering. His academic background is in ethics, religion, social theory, and genetics. Green is author of the book Space Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), co-author of the Ethics in Technology Practice corporate technology ethics resources (2018), co-editor of the book Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics (Lexington, 2022), and co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Moral Theology on AI and moral theology (2022).
Irina Raicu
Director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Marrkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Center. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional, and her work addresses issues ranging from privacy and data ethics to social media’s impact on society, from the digital divide to the ethics of encryption, and the ethics of AI (she is a member of the Partnership on AI's Working Group on Fair, Transparent, and Accountable AI). Her writing has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, U.S.A. Today, MarketWatch, Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Recode, and she has authored and co-authored a variety of teaching materials, including the Ethics in Technology Practice compendium.
Summer Institute in Technology Ethics Primary Instructors
Shannon Vallor
Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy and directs EFI’s Centre for Technomoral Futures. Professor Vallor’s research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI, and she is a former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google. Professor Vallor currently serves as Chair of Scotland’s Data Delivery Group. In addition to her many articles and published educational modules on the ethics of data, robotics, and artificial intelligence, she is the author of the book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016), the forthcoming Lessons from the AI Mirror: Rebuilding Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology (Oxford University Press, 2022).
John P. Sullins
Professor of Philosophy at Sonoma State University
John P. Sullins is a professor of philosophy at Sonoma State University and the director of programming for the Sonoma State University Center for Ethics Law and Society (CELS). He has numerous publications on the ethics of autonomous weapons systems, self-driving cars, personal robotics, affective robotics, malware ethics, and the philosophy and ethics of information technologies as well as the design of autonomous ethical agents. He is involved in industry and government consultation involving ethical practices in technology design, He is the co-author of “Courses on Ethics and AI and Autonomous Systems (IEEE, 2019)” as well as chairing the committee on Affective Computing for the IEEE “Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-Being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems” and he co-chairs the IEEE Standards Committee P7008 - Standard for Ethically Driven Nudging for Robotic, Intelligent and Autonomous Systems. He is the co-author of Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars (Bloomsbury Press, 2021).