Steering Committee

Steering Committee

Melissa Lane
Class of 1943 Professor of Politics; Director, University Center for Human Values.
mslane@princeton.edu

Melissa Lane is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and director of the University Center for Human Values. Melissa is also an associated faculty member in the Department of Classics and the Department of Philosophy. She is co-convenor of the Climate Futures Initiative, supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and is a member of the Climate Change Working Group of the Social Sciences Research Council, as well as a member of the executive committee of Princeton’s Program in Classical Philosophy, and a trustee of Princeton University Press, the editorial board of which she is chairing in 2018-19. She was awarded a 2015 Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize at Princeton University.

In 2018, Melissa Lane delivered the following named lectures: the Carlyle Lectures (University of Oxford); the Sir Malcolm Knox Memorial Lecture (University of St Andrews, Scotland); the Fifth Annual Joint Lecture of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Edinburgh, Scotland); the Philip Hallie Lecture, Wesleyan University; the Gerald F. Else Lecture in the Humanities, University of Michigan; and the Charles McCracken Distinguished Guest Lecture, Michigan State University.  She also served as the Lucy Shoe Merritt Scholar in Residence (American Academy in Rome). Similar honors in the recent past include delivering the keynote lecture for the 2016 London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought; the annual public lecture of the Centre for Political Philosophy at the University of Leiden; the 2015 Chapman Lecture at the University of Auckland; and the 2015 Hood Lecture, also at the University of Auckland. She has received a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in the field of classics.  Recent public contributions include a seminar for the Civil Service Leadership Academy in London; a panel discussion at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles co-sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Museum and Zócalo Public Square; and periodic participation in the BBC Radio Four series ‘In Our Time’ with Melvyn Bragg, most recently discussing Cicero’s political philosophy.


Professor Ed Felten
Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs
felten@princeton.edu

Edward W. Felten is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is a member of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. In 2015-2017 he served in the White House as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In 2011-12 he served as the first Chief Technologist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. His research interests include computer security and privacy, and technology law and policy. He has published more than 150 papers in the research literature, and three books. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the ACM. In 2004, Scientific American magazine named him to its list of fifty worldwide science and technology leaders.


Dr. Annette Zimmermann
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Values and Public Policy at Princeton University (joint appoinment at the University Center for Human Values and the Center for Information Technology Policy)
annettez@princeton.edu

Dr. Annette Zimmermann is a political philosopher working on the ethics of algorithmic decision-making, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Dr Zimmermann has additional research interests in moral philosophy (the ethics of risk and uncertainty) and legal philosophy (rights, discrimination, and the philosophy of punishment), as well as the philosophy of science (models, explanation, abstraction).

In the context of her current research project “The Algorithmic Is Political”, she is focusing on the ways in which disproportionate distributions of risk and uncertainty associated with the use of emerging technologies—such as algorithmic bias and opacity—impact democratic values like equality and justice.

At Princeton University, she is based at the Center for Human Values and at the Center for Information Technology Policy. Dr Zimmermann holds a DPhil (PhD) and MPhil in political philosophy from the University of Oxford (Nuffield College and St Cross College), as well as a BA from the Freie Universität Berlin. She has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, Yale University, and SciencesPo Paris.


Dr. Ashley Gorham
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Values and Public Policy at Princeton University (joint appoinment at the University Center for Human Values and the Center for Information Technology Policy)

Dr. Ashley E. Gorham is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Values and Public Policy, affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Policy in the Woodrow Wilson School. Her research uses political theory to examine a variety of topics related to the internet, including hacktivism, algorithms, and platforms.

Gorham recently defended her dissertation, “Information and Democracy: Lessons from the Hacktivists,” in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018-19, she was a research fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute and an affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.


Professor Chloé Bakalar
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University
cbakalar@princeton.edu

Chloé Bakalar is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She is a political and legal philosopher with a background in empirical social science. Her research interests include: ethics and public policy (esp. IT ethics), normative ethics, democratic theory, modern political thought, contemporary political thought, American political thought, the history of ideas and public law (esp. First Amendment). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Small Talk: The Socialities of Speech in Liberal Democracy, which explores how experiences of “everyday talk” may produce positive or negative effects on democratic citizens and institutions in accordance with the norms and rules of those spaces in which it occurs. Prof. Bakalar is also working on several additional research projects explicitly at the intersection of AI, ethics and political philosophy, with the aim of improving understandings about the impacts of these technologies on society. In one such paper, “Programming Deliberation,” she considers social media’s large-scale adoption of automated content moderation algorithms (ACMAs) that prioritize “like-able” content in terms of its effects on democratic values, arguing that the liberal principles often underlying the development and deployment of these AI tools promote real democratic harms. A second ongoing project challenges the now-common “AI ethics” framing, by showing that debates in this field are neither purely about AI—but also the social, economic and political contexts in which such systems operate—nor ethics—but also intractable problems of politics and economics—and arguing for a more comprehensive political theory of AI that provides a sharper focus on institutions and their incentive structures at both the micro- and macro-levels. A third forthcoming paper uses legal and political theory frameworks to develop an account of “public goods” in the context of certain types of AI, focusing on the question of what it means for a technology to be “necessary” to the protection of basic rights of citizens.

Prof. Bakalar has been with the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics since its founding in 2017. In addition to her involvement with the Dialogues’ inter-university collaborations, workshops and public conferences, she is the project lead for the case studies and other educational initiatives, including the glossary of technical terms and curriculum development.

Prof. Bakalar was previously a Values and Public Policy Postdoctoral Research Associate the University Center for Human Values (UCHV) and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP), as well as a Senior Research Specialist at CITP. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from New York University.


Ben Zevenbergen, LL.M.
Visiting Professional Specialist at the Center for Information Technology Policy
benzevenbergen@princeton.edu

Ben Zevenbergen is a visiting Professional Specialist at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and a D.Phil candidate at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. His work is focuses on the intersection of computers/algorithms/networks/ and law/policy/philosophy. He has approached this intersection as a practicing lawyer, a policy advisor at the European Parliament, a researcher on various multidisciplinary research consortia. His task at Princeton is to help set up a collaboration between the Center for Information Technology Policy and the University Center for Human Values. The Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics are one of the fruits of this collaboration. Ben is still finishing his Ph.D thesis on the research ethics for projects involving unsuspecting Internet users ot the University of Oxford and holds an LLM in Information Law from the University of Amsterdam.