Speaker Bios

More to be announced soon!

Keynotes

Arvind Narayanan, PhD

Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University
Director, Center for Information Technology Policy

Princeton University

Keynote

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a co-author of the book AI Snake Oil, the essay AI as Normal Technology, and a newsletter of the same name which is read by over 60,000 researchers, policy makers, journalists, and AI enthusiasts. He previously co-authored two widely used computer science textbooks: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies and Fairness in Machine Learning. Narayanan led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. His work was among the first to show how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes. Narayanan was one of TIME’s inaugural list of 100 most influential people in AI. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Reggie Townsend

Vice President, SAS Data Ethics Practice (DEP)
SAS

Keynote

Reggie Townsend is the VP of the SAS Data Ethics Practice (DEP). As the guiding hand for the company’s responsible innovation efforts, the DEP empowers employees and customers to deploy data-driven systems that promote human well-being, agency and equity to meet new and existing regulations and policies. Townsend serves on national committees and boards promoting trustworthy and responsible AI, combining his passion and knowledge with SAS’ more than four decades of AI and analytics expertise.

Nicholas Christakis, PhDN

Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science
Yale University

Keynote

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. His work is in the fields of network science and biosocial science. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017; and the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Panel on AI Companionship and Intimacy

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, PhD

Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics

Duke University

Moderator

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University with secondary appointments in Duke’s Law School and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He teaches a MOOC, Think Again, with over a million students registered. His research is mainly on moral artificial intelligence, political polarization, and various topics in moral psychology and neuroscience. His trade book (with Vincent Conitzer and Jana Schaich Borg) on Moral AI and How We Can Get There was published in 2024.

Kaamna Bhojwani

Sex, Tech, and Spirituality Podcast

Kaamna Bhojwani is a sexuality researcher, educator, and leading voice on digisexuality, exploring the social, psychological, ethical, and spiritual implications of technologies like AI and humanoid robots on intimacy and relationships. She hosts the Sex, Tech and Spirituality podcast, runs the popular KaamnaLive channel, and writes the Becoming Technosexual column for Psychology Today. A frequent guest on outlets including NBC, Reuters, and Al Jazeera, Kaamna studied sexual shame at Columbia University and is currently writing her first book, Sex, Tech and Spirituality.

Jana Schaich Borg, PhD

Associate Research Professor in the Social Science Research Institute
Duke University

Dr. Schaich Borg is an Associate Research Professor at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute, co-Director of Duke’s Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making Lab and Duke’s Moral Artificial Intelligence Lab, and former Director of Duke’s Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science. She holds affiliate positions at Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute for Brain Science, and Kenan Institute for Ethics, and has taught in Duke’s Master of Quantitative Management Program at Fuqua School of Business. In addition to her academic roles, her book Moral AI and How We Get There (with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Vincent Conitzer; Penguin, 2024) empowers readers of all backgrounds to grapple with the complex moral opportunities and challenges of AI. Her online classes on Coursera have reached over 200,000 students worldwide.

Timothy J. Strauman

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Duke School of Medicine

Professor Strauman’s research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological processes that enable self-regulation, conceptualized in terms of a cognitive/motivational perspective, as well as the relation between self-regulation and affect. Particular areas of emphasis include: (1) conceptualizing self-regulation in terms of brain/behavior motivational systems; (2) the role of self-regulatory cognitive processes in vulnerability to depression and other disorders; (3) the impact of treatments for depression, such as psychotherapy and medication, on self-regulatory function and dysfunction in depression; (4) how normative and non-normative socialization patterns influence the development of self-regulatory systems; (5) the contributory roles of self-regulation, affect, and psychopathology in determining immunologically-mediated susceptibility to illness; (6) development of novel multi-component treatments for depression targeting self-regulatory dysfunction; (7) utilization of brain imaging techniques to test hypotheses concerning self-regulation, including the nature and function of hypothetical regulatory systems and characterizing the breakdowns in self-regulation that lead to and accompany depression.

New Faculty Spotlights

Alessio Brini, PhD

Executive In Residence in the Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs

Pratt School of Engineering

Talk Title: AI in Finance and Economics: From Data to Decisions that Matter

Alessio Brini is Executive in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, where he works with the Digital Asset Research & Engineering Collaborative (DAREC). His research focuses on applying machine learning to finance and economics, with an emphasis on decentralized finance and digital assets. At Duke, he teaches courses in Machine Learning for FinTech, Data Wrangling, and Econometrics, and mentors students on applied FinTech research projects. Brini earned his Ph.D. in Mathematical Finance from Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), where he studied reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making in finance. His work bridges data science, financial markets, and computational economics.

Rich Eva, PhD

Director, Character Forward Initiative

Pratt School of Engineering

Talk Title: Technology & Suffering

Rich is the Director of Character Forward, an initiative in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering that integrates character formation across the engineering experience. He also serves as a research fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. Rich earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Baylor University and his A.B. from Princeton, where he competed as a Division I athlete. Before graduate school, he worked for several years at Barclays Bank as an assistant vice president specializing in contract negotiation. His research and teaching center around ethics, political philosophy, and pedagogy.

Brandon Fain, PhD

Assistant Professor of the Practice

Computer Science

Talk Title: Fairness in the Alignment Problem

Brandon Fain is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Duke University’s Department of Computer Science, where his research and teaching focus on algorithms, artificial intelligence, fairness, and ethical factors. Fain teaches some of the largest courses at Duke on algorithms and machine learning, and his research has been published at leading conferences including AAAI, AAMAS, ICML, IJCAI, and ACM FAccT.

Wenhao Jiang, PhD

Assistant Professor

Sociology

Talk Title: Interaction-Level Segregation: An Image-Driven Approach

Wenhao Jiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University, where he is affiliated with the Duke University Population Research Institute (DUPRI). He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University. His research examines the cultural meanings of work, the temporal organization of labor, and the uneven spatial distribution of opportunities and workplace networks, using large-scale data and computational methods. His teaching focuses on the integration of causal inference and machine learning, as well as the study of labor market stratification in the era of algorithms and the proliferation of personal data.

Tong Qiu, PhD

Assistant Professor

Ecology

Talk Title: AI for Ecology: Harnessing Remote Sensing to Understand Ecosystem Functions in Natural and Built Environments

Tong Qiu is an ecologist interested in understanding how global change affects terrestrial ecosystem functions and services across scales. He is particularly interested in how climate and habitat change jointly drive biodiversity shifts within both natural and urban systems. Together with his graduate students and postdocs, Tong develops data-model synthesis frameworks that integrate multi-source remote sensing, field sampling, and ecological monitoring networks with advance statistical and deep learning models.

Daniel Scott Smith, PhD

Assistant Professor

Sociology

Talk Title: How AI is helping us discover the nature and impact of human judgment in science

Daniel Scott Smith studies what makes or breaks science. He leverages natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and generative AI to analyze millions of texts to examine the social foundations and impacts of scientific knowledge from global, historical, and gender/feminist lenses. His work advances three objectives: (1) explain the social determinants and effects of scientific authority, (2) describe and improve the foundations of scientific knowledge making, and (3) understand and foster innovation and viewpoint diversity in science. Before arriving to Duke as an assistant professor of Sociology, he was a postdoc at Stanford and he holds three degrees from there and one in policy from Harvard.

Richard So, PhD

Michael G. Rhodes and Maureen C. Rhodes Associate Professor in the Digital Humanities
English

Talk Title: TBD

Richard So is the Michael G. Rhodes and Maureen C. Rhodes Associate Professor in Digital Humanities and English at Duke University, holding the Rhodes Chair in Digital Humanities. He bridges humanities and data science, focusing on computational methods and AI to study culture and explore how humanistic insight can guide ethical AI. His research spans literary analysis, cultural analytics, and “cultural AI,” including projects that rigorously test AI’s capacity for close reading and reasoning about art and poetry. So’s work has appeared in leading journals like PMLA, Critical Inquiry, ACL, and PNAS, and he writes for broader outlets including The New York Times and The Atlantic. His scholarship emphasizes “co‑intelligence,” aiming to enhance human creativity through collaboration with AI. [richardjea….github.io], [scholars.duke.edu]

Anne L. Washington, PhD

Associate Professor
Sanford School of Public Policy

Talk Title: TBD

Anne L. Washington, PhD is a scholar of public interest technology. She interrogates organizational dynamics that impact the legitimacy, creation, analysis, and public release of digital sources. Her writing asks questions about the balance of power between human lives and organizations that control digital record-keeping systems.

She earned a master’s degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS) at Rutgers University, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Brown University.

Shuyan Zhou, PhD

Assistant Professor

Computer Science

Talk Title: Building the playgrounds for AI agent

Shuyan Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University, where she is affiliated with the DukeNLP group. She directs the i2x lab, which explores research on AI agents, their environments, and their interactions with humans. Prior to her position at Duke, Shuyan was a research lead at Meta focusing on general purpose computer use agents. She obtained her Ph.D. in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, under the supervision of Professor Graham Neubig. Her research pioneered foundational work in AI agent evaluation, establishing standard benchmarks for the field.