CounterBalance
The CounterBalance Project is concerned with the impact of AI on civil institutions. Specifically, we are concerned with how AI will impact the beliefs, behaviors, and collective intelligence of the communities that civil institutions convene. Towards this end, the CounterBalance Project will convene a new community with four different types of members.
The initial core of this community has been scientists and complexity researchers who study the impact of digital tools on belief, behavior, and collective intelligence. This core speaks directly to members of the community that CounterBalance has been convening since 2020. Starting in 2026 we will take active steps to expand the CounterBalance community, by bringing in:
i. folks who build open-source digital tools that empower civil institutions in the so-called “Age of AI;”
ii. folks who lead their institution’s deployment of those tools; and
iii. folks who fund the development of those tools
CounterBalance was established in 2020 by Mirta Galesic, Will Tracy, and Joshua Garland as a quarterly seminar series on applied belief dynamics. In 2025, it began to focus on the impact of AI on belief dynamics, and in 2026 the project pivoted to focus on how civil institutions can moderate the epistemic impact of AI. CounterBalance is currently overseen by Will Tracy and is coordinated by Denise Wernly. We are grateful to Siegel Family Endowment for past support of this project.
Past Speakers Include:
Amalia is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Mannheim School of Social Sciences. Prior to that, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn.
Her general research interests focus on conditions under which social norms change and emerge, particularly the effects of social feedback and contextual information on perception and conformity to social norms.
Bernie is an Assistant Professor of computer science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. She collaborates with domain scientists investigating our world, building pipelines to do better science. Her current projects include AquiLLM, a RAG-LLM to study tacit knowledge in research groups, funded by the Sloan Foundation and the NSF. AquiLLM case studies include astronomy, environmental science, and computational acoustics. Her related work includes GreenCrossingAI with environmental scientist Dr. Karen Mager here at SOU , and the Astrophysics Data Lab at UCLA with astrophysicist Dr. Tuan Do.
Carl is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology and mathematical population genetics, he enjoys working across disciplines and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences.
The unifying theme running throughout his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Lately he has become concerned with the spread of disinformation on social networks, and interested in figuring out what we can do about it.
Cathy Buerger joined the Dangerous Speech Project (DSP) in September of 2017. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut (UConn), where her research examined the impact of human rights education on political beliefs and behavior in Ghana.
Her current research at the DSP focuses on global responses to dangerous and hateful speech as well as the process of identity formation among those who choose to respond to such speech. She also coordinates the DSP’s Global Research Fellowship.
Cathy is a Research Affiliate of UConn’s Economic and Social Rights Research Group, Managing Editor of the Journal of Human Rights, and an Editor for the Teaching Human Rights Database.
Chris Slowe is an American businessman. He gained his PhD in physics from Harvard University, and went on to co-found Reddit, with Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. He later departed Reddit and began work for Hipmunk, where he was Chief Scientist. He returned to Reddit in 2017 and is currently its CTO.
David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.
He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Deen Freelon is the Allan Randall Freelon Sr. Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. A widely recognized expert on digital politics and computational social science, he has authored or coauthored over 60 book chapters, funded reports, and articles in journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of the first communication researchers to apply computational methods to social media data and has developed eight open-source research software packages.
Filippo Menczer is the Luddy distinguished professor of informatics and computer science and the director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Menczer is an ACM Fellow and a board member of the IU Network Science Institute. His research interests span Web and data science, computational social science, science of science, and modeling of complex information networks. In the last ten years, his lab has led efforts to study online misinformation spread and to develop tools to detect and counter social media manipulation.
Jan serves as Global Head of Trust & Safety at Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and Wikidata, as well as other free-knowledge projects. Jan is also a working group member at the Trust & Safety Professional Association.
Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Flack directs SFI's Collective Computation Group (C4). Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Jonathan Charles Rauch is an American author, journalist, and activist. After graduating from Yale University, Rauch worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, for National Journal, and later for The Economist and as a freelance writer.
Joshua is an an Associate Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence. The center, which is a unit of ASU’s Global Security Initiative, combines social science and advanced algorithms to study how stories shape people’s actions and world politics. Its goal is to help protect against hostile attempts to influence the U.S. and democracy.
Previously he held an Applied Complexity Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute where he worked to bridge the gap between math theory and the messy data of the real world’s complex systems, like climate, belief dynamics or the human heart. He has also helped people understand how decision-making algorithms work, so that they can use these tools more fairly when it comes to issues like housing or criminal justice.
Josh Joseph is Berkman Klein’s Chief AI Scientist, the first role of its kind at BKC. Josh will lead teams to explore measuring and controlling the agency of AI systems, benchmarking these systems beyond measures of“intelligence,” and to help build the infrastructure for in-house AI research.
Josh received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his research focused on how artificial systems can learn to act in the presence of the complexity of the real-world. Following his Ph.D., he worked in industry building AI systems in finance and life sciences before returning to academia to serve as the Chief Intelligence Architect of MIT’s Quest for Intelligence. He then co-founded and serves as the Chief Science Officer at Covariance.ai, an MIT startup that was selected as a STEX25 company of the MIT Startup Exchange and won the 2024 Cubies Innovation Prize from the D^3 Institute at Harvard University.
Juliet Shen has dedicated her career to building tools and technology that protect people online. Her areas of expertise include content moderation systems, child safety, abuse detection and enforcement, threat intelligence, and machine learning.
Juliet is currently a Product Lead at the Trust and Safety Tools Consortium hosted at SIPA. Prior to joining SIPA, Juliet was a Product Lead at Google where she works on scaled spam and abuse on consumer and enterprise platforms like Workspace. Juliet was previously the Director of Product for Trust & Safety at Grindr and Snapchat’s first Product Manager focused on Trust & Safety where she built out the technical infrastructure for online safety.
During her time at Snap, Juliet served as co-chair of the Tech Innovation working group at the Technology Coalition, an alliance of global tech companies who work together to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse online. She was an instrumental part of Project Lantern, the first-ever child safety cross-platform signal sharing program, and the pilot for a video hash interoperability platform. Juliet holds a Bachelor’s in Political Science and Sociology from the SUNY Albany and lives in New York.
Karine Mellata is cofounder and CEO of startup Intrinsic, which uses prompt injection to catch job applications written by LLMs
Lena Frischlich (PhD in Psychology, University of Cologne) is a junior research group leader in the Department of Communication at the University of Muenster, Germany. She researches the staging and effects of manipulation-oriented political online communication and aims at understanding how resilience against such manipulation attempts can be fostered. Since 2013 she has been (co-) PI on multiple third-party funding projects, including “Propaganda 2.0 – psychological effects of Islamic-extremist and right-wing extremist Internet videos”. Since 2018 she has led the interdisciplinary research group “DemoRESILdigital – democratic resilience in times of online-propaganda, fake news, fear and hate speech,” where she had the pleasure to work with a team of information scientists, psychologists, and communication scholars. From 2020 to 2021, Lena worked as an interim professor for media change at the Ludwigs-Maximilian University in Munich. Since 2020 she has been member of the young college of the North-Rhine Westphalian Academy of Science and the Arts.
Lydia Wilson is a research fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford; senior fellow and field director at Artis International; and a visiting scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, the Graduate Center, City University New York.
She graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, and a PhD in medieval Arabic philosophy, all from the University of Cambridge. During a postdoctoral research position in 2011, also at Cambridge, Lydia joined Artis International, starting with fieldwork in Northern Iraq. Work with Artis continued during a Mellon Fellowship at the Graduate Center, City University New York, and the founding of CRIC; fieldwork sites expanded to Lebanon and Northern Ireland (as well as continuing the work in Iraq), and responsibilities expanded to mentoring and training younger field workers. As well as her academic publications, Lydia writes for the Times Literary Supplement (on both medieval and modern Middle Eastern studies), the Nation, Nautilus, Rain Taxi, open democracy and others, and edits the Cambridge Literary Review
Marc Ziegele is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on political online communication at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. He is also head of the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. Before coming to Düsseldorf, he worked as a research associate at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he also graduated in Media Economy.
His research interests include participation and discussions of citizens on the internet. The DIID-based junior research group investigates how the quality and effects of public user discussions about political topics can be improved. Moreover, Ziegele analyzes the sources and consequences of people’s trust in the mass media and different aspects of citizens’ use of the social web at the interface of Communication Studies and Psychology.
Melanie Mitchell is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and inaugural Fractal Faculty member. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems.
Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Melanie originated the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer platform, which offers online courses and other educational resources related to the field of complex systems. Her online course “Introduction to Complexity” has been taken by over 25,000 students, and is one of Course Central’s “top fifty online courses of all time”.
Mina is an Associate Professor in Harvard's Department of Psychology. Professor Cikara studies how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She focuses primarily on how group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others. She uses a wide range of tools—standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI and psychophysiology—to examine failures of empathy, dehumanization, and misunderstanding between groups. Mina Cikara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and director of the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab.
Mirta Galesic is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM, as well as an Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with properties of the external environment to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. In one line of research, she investigates how apparent cognitive biases in social judgments emerge as a product of the interplay of well-adapted minds and the statistical structure of social environments. In another, she studies how collective performance depend on the interaction of group decision strategies and network structures. A third line of research investigates opinion dynamics in real-world societies using cognitively-enriched models from statistical physics. And, she studies how people understand and cope with uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.
Morteza is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Computer Science USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. His expertise lies in political and moral language, textual and semantic analysis, and morality. He holds a Ph.D. Computer Science, Northwestern University, 2009 and completed his Postdoc at Northwestern University in Psychology.
Nafees Hamid is a Frederick Bonnart-Braunthal Trust scholar in the Terrorism and Organized Crime Unit in University College London’s department of Security and Crime Science, and an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. His research focuses on the psychology of radicalization as well as the rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe. As a field researcher he conducts ethnographic interviews, large-scale surveys, psychology field experiments, crime mapping, social network analysis and neuroimaging studies. These broad range of studies has led him to being a visiting scholar at the Santa Fe Institute where he worked with faculty on developing mathematical complex systems models of radicalization based on his ethnographic and survey data; and a visiting scholar at the Neuroimaging Unit at the Autonomous University of Barcelona where worked with neuroscientists on conducting the first ever brain scan studies of jihadist supporters and radicalized individuals. In Europe, his primary field sites are Barcelona, Paris, Lunel, Brussels, London and Birmingham yet he works collaboratively with ARTIS’ expansive research network on various conflicts around the world. He earned his graduate degree in Cognitive Science from École Normale Supérieure in Paris and completed a double major in Cognitive Science and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Previous to joining ARTIS, his research primarily focused on moral and political psychology as well as the cognitive impacts of HIV/AID’s medication, early detection markers of autism, and the embodiment of language. He has worked with many political organizations that have researched and communicated the effects of private campaign contributions on political decision-making, in the US. His career started as a professional stage and screen actor in the US and he continues to write and consult on film and TV scripts related to radicalization and international conflicts.
Neil Johnson is a professor of physics at GW and heads up a new initiative in Complexity and Data Science which combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems. His research interests lie in the broad area of Complex Systems and ‘many-body’ out-of-equilibrium systems of collections of objects, ranging from crowds of particles to crowds of people and from environments as distinct as quantum information processing in nanostructures through to the online world of collective behavior on social media.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and is the recipient of the 2018 Burton Award from the APS. He received his BA/MA from St. John's College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge and his PhD as a Kennedy Scholar from Harvard University. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and later a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford until 2007, having joined the faculty in 1992. Following a period as Professor of Physics at the University of Miami, he was appointed Professor of Physics at George Washington University in 2018. He presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures "Arrows of Time" on BBC TV in 1999. He has more than 300 published research papers across a variety of research topics and has supervised the doctoral theses of more than 25 students. His published books include Financial Market Complexity published by Oxford University Press and Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory published by Oneworld Publications. He co-founded and co-directed CABDyN (Complex Agent-Based Dynamical Systems) which is Oxford University's interdisciplinary research center in Complexity Science, and an Oxford University interdisciplinary research center in financial complexity (OCCF).
Nicolas Velasquez Hernandez is a Post-Doctoral Research Scientist for the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University
Olivia is a Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of mathematics and sociology at Dartmouth. Her research focuses on the dynamics of human behavior and in particular, the effects that different forms of heterogeneity have on these dynamics. She uses a combination of mathematical modeling (including evolutionary game theory and opinion dynamics models), computational simulations, and data collection and analysis. Olivia employs these methods to study group-structured populations and the interplay between behavior, personality, group memberships, and interactions, with applications to the evolution of cooperation, social integration, and polarization. Before coming to Dartmouth, she received her Ph.D. in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton, and her B.A. in Mathematics from NYU.
Rashad Ali is a Resident Senior Fellow at ISD. Rashad is a counter terrorism practitioner who works on deradicalisation initiatives alongside Prisons, Probation Services, Police and community groups. He was formerly a national leadership member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the revolutionary Islamist organisation and has been actively involved in undermining its extreme ideology and perversion of Muslim faith since his departure. As a researcher he has given testimony and contributed submissions to the Home Affairs Select Committee on Radicalisation, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Intelligence and has briefed the London Mayor's office on Counter Terrorism and has been consulted by think tanks and governments in Germany, Denmark, the EU and the US. He is an external lecturer for Derby University’s Master Class courses on Radicalisation and Counter Terrorism. He has written for The Observer, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, Dissent Magazine, Birlingske in Denmark, Conservative Home, and given commentary for Newsnight, BBC News. He is the author of Islam, Shariah and the Far Right published by Demoqratiya journal, A Guide to Refuting Jihadism published by HJS and EFD, and the author of the ISD report Blasphemy, Charlie Hebdo, and the Freedom of Belief and Expression. He is classically trained in Islamic theology and jurisprudence and Modern studies in Islam. He studied at al-Azhar University, Cairo, and the Markfield Institute.
Dr. Hammond is the Betty Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Public Health at Washington University in St Louis. He is also Director of the Center on Social Dynamics & Policy and a Senior Fellow in Economics at The Brookings Institution. His research for the past two decades has focused on applying complex systems science to challenging policy problems, including work on chronic disease prevention, health disparities, pandemic containment, tobacco control, implementation science, and the food system. He has authored numerous articles in journals such as The Lancet, Science, JAMA, Nature Medicine, PNAS, and the American Journal of Public Health, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, New Scientist, Salon, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and major news outlets. Professor Hammond is an advisory Special Government Employee at the FDA and serves on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies of Science. Hammond previously served on the DHHS Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities at NIH, on several National Academy of Sciences consensus panels, and on the recent Lancet Commission on Obesity, and he has been a founding member of several NIH scientific networks focused on computational system science modeling.
Rhys Leahy is a data science researcher at George Washington University where she studies online hate speech, misinformation, and information operations. She has co-authored papers on these topics in Nature, Scientific Reports, and IEEE, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Rhys is also a founding partner of ClustrX, a research firm that specializes in mapping and modeling online movements.
Seungwoong's interests range from statistical physics, complex systems, network science, social science, artificial intelligence, and deep learning as well. During his Ph. D., he attempted to solve problems in complex systems by constructing novel and interpretable neural networks. Now he is slightly shifting his focus to more social systems and wants to formulate/model the emergence/evolution of diverse social phenomena. At SFI, He will mainly explore how people's knowledge and opinions change in the community from both belief dynamics and machine learning perspectives. Seungwoong received his BS, MS and PhD in Physics from KAIST, and previously at the School of Computational Sciences at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) as a Postdoctoral research fellow.
Simon A. Levin is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and the Director of the Center for BioComplexity in the Princeton Environmental Institute. His research examines the structure and functioning of ecosystems, the dynamics of disease, and the coupling of ecological and socioeconomic systems. Levin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, and the Istituto Lombardo (Milan). He has over 500 publications and is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity and the Princeton Guide to Ecology. Levin’s awards include: the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, Margalef Prize for Ecology, the Ecological Society of America’s MacArthur and Eminent Ecologist Awards, the Luca Pacioli Prize (Ca’Foscari University of Venice), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and the National Medal of Science.
Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.
He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.
Simon holds an A.B. in astrophysics from Harvard, a Master’s in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. He has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.
Stefani Crabtree is Assistant Professor of Social-Environmental Modeling in the Department of Environment and Society of the Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University. Her research applies complex systems science modeling methodologies (such as agent-based modeling and network science) to problems in social science and ecology. Current research topics include the human place in ecosystems worldwide, the ability to use the archaeological past to calibrate our understanding of human resilience, and the feedbacks between ecosystem health and human health. Crabtree has published in general science and disciplinary journals across social science and ecology, including PNAS, Ecological Modelling, American Antiquity, Physics Today, Human Ecology, Journal of Archaeological Science, and Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. She additionally holds external affiliation at Crow Canyon Research Institute and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. From 2016-2018 she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Human Environmental Dynamics laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Crabtree holds two Ph.D.s, one from Washington State University (Anthropology, 2016) and one from the Université de Franche-Comté (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et l’Environnement, 2017).
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol and the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society, and a Humboldt Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (UK) and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science. He was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education.
His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update their memories if information they believe turn out to be false. This has led him to examine the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society, including conspiracy theories. He is particularly interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science.
Susan is an Adjunct Associate Professor at School of International Service at American University. She founded and directs the Dangerous Speech Project (dangerousspeech.org), to study speech that can inspire violence - and to find ways to prevent this, without infringing on freedom of expression. She conducts research on methods to diminish harmful speech online, or the harm itself. Trained as a human rights lawyer at Yale, Susan has worked for NGOs including Amnesty International and Human Rights First. She is also Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Thalia Wheatley is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Social Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. Her research program investigates how ideas and emotions are created collectively and how one person can influence another in ways that ripple across the social webs they inhabit. Using diverse methods including neuroimaging, natural language processing, cross-cultural behavior and social network analysis, Wheatley is building a framework to understand how minds couple with each other and why that coupling is so important to the stability and resilience of neural and social networks.
Thomas Costello is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at American University and Research Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology from Emory University and completed his B.A. in Philosophy at Binghamton University.
Thomas studies where political and social beliefs come from, how they differ from person to person–and, ultimately, why they change–using the tools of personality, cognitive, clinical, and political science. He is best known for his work on (a) leveraging artificial intelligence to reduce conspiracy theory beliefs and (b) the psychology of authoritarianism. He has published many research papers in peer-reviewed outlets, including Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Thomas has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, interviewed on television programs like NBC’s Nightly News and the BBC World News, radio shows and podcasts like CBC/Radio-Canada, CNN, NPR, BBC, and The Guardian. Additionally, he developed DebunkBot.com, a public tool for combatting conspiracy theories with AI. His research has secured more than $500,000 in grant funding and earned him several awards, including the Heritage Dissertation Research Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the JS Tanaka Dissertation Award from the Association for Research in Personality, and the Klarman Fellowship from Cornell University.
Tina Eliassi-Rad is a Professor of Computer Science and the inaugural President Joseph E. Aoun Professor at Northeastern University. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and the Institute for Experiential AI. In addition, she is an external faculty member at SFI and the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Before joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that a member of the technical staff at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Tina works at the intersection of AI and network science, and is interested in the impact of science and technology on society. Her algorithms have been integrated into systems used by governments, industry, and open-source software. Tina received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science in 2010, became an ISI Foundation Fellow in 2019, was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021, received Northeastern’s Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award in 2022, and in 2023, she was awarded the Lagrange Prize-CRT Foundation and became an elected Fellow of the Network Science Society.
Umang Bhatt is an Assistant Professor in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he is based in the Institute for Technology and Humanity (ITH) and its Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA). He is also a Fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at King's College, Cambridge.
Previously, he was an Assistant Professor & Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University and a Senior Research Associate at Alan Turing Institute. He completed his PhD in the Cambridge Machine Learning Group, advised by Adrian Weller. He holds an MS and BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He grew up in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, USA.
Previously Head of Safeguards at Anthropic, Vinay is democratizing robust Trust and Safety tools through open source at ROOST. He has eighteen years of hands-on experience tackling safety challenges across the technology landscape, most recently focusing on AI safety at Anthropic, covering the full range of harms — from catastrophic to agentic. His expertise spans AI, ads, content, account, offline, and payment safety risks.
Vincent Sha is the Technical Lead and Founding Member at Open Forum for AI and also serves as the inaugural Associate Dean of Information Technology and Operation for Carnegie Mellon University's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In this role, he is responsible for developing IT strategies and operational resources to support all aspects of the college's administrative, teaching, and research missions. His services span from traditional desktop support to advanced data analytics for decision-making support. With 25 years of IT experience, including more than a decade in leadership roles, Vincent is known for fostering collaborative innovation and driving digital culture changes at both college and university levels. His expertise encompasses service design, systems implementation, digital transformations, and process improvement. Moreover, Vincent is a subject matter expert on IT-related policy and excels in applying technology to problem-solving in research, education, and other domains.
Yujin is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on AI alignment and ethics issues. Her interests span a wide range of topics within AI alignment/ethics, including examining the societal impacts of AI, identifying AI misalignment, building a benchmark to evaluate model safety, studying AI behaviors in multi-agent settings, and addressing AI bias. Previously, she conducted research on the security and privacy of decentralization technologies such as blockchain, DeFi, and DAOs. She employs methodologies that encompass theoretical analysis (e.g., game theory, probability theory) and empirical analysis (e.g., data analysis, user surveys). Moreover, she collaborates closely with researchers from diverse fields such as sociology and economics.
Ziqi is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Information School at University of Sheffield. Previously he was a computer science lecturer at the Computing and Technology Department at Nottingham Trent University. Before that he was a researcher in the OAK research lab at University of Sheffield. His research addresses methods that enable machines to extract human knowledge from text, to represent such knowledge in a structured representation that is understandable and usable by machines. This ultimately enhances our capability of processing and sense-making of very large scale data, improving decision making.