Responsible AI Symposium
Duke University
Feb 28 - Mar 3 2025
The Responsible AI Symposium, co-sponsored by The Society-Centered AI Initiative at Duke, the Duke Artificial Intelligence Master of Engineering, Duke AI Health, the Duke Office of Climate and Sustainability, and the Coach K Center for Leadership and Ethics (COLE), will bring together industry and academic leaders, researchers, and students to discuss emerging trends in society-centered AI and responsible AI.
The event will consist of industry and academic keynote talks, spotlight research talks, and a poster session to share new ideas in the development of Responsible AI. Saturday's SCAI Summit will be an opportunity to explore the myriad of ways in which AI will influence human behavior and how social factors will shape the future of AI technology.
Featured Speakers
Yann LeCun
Meta FAIR & New York University
Yann LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta and a Professor at NYU. He was the founding Director of Meta-FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science. After a PhD from Sorbonne Université and research positions at AT&T and NEC, he joined NYU in 2003 and Meta in 2013. He received the 2018 ACM Turing Award for his work on AI. He is a member of the US National Academies and the French Académie des Sciences.
Cynthia Rudin
Duke University
Dr. Cynthia Rudin is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She directs the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab, and her goal is to design predictive models that people can understand. Her lab applies machine learning in many areas, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and energy reliability. She is the recipient of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (the "Nobel Prize of AI"). She received a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Ronnie Chatterji
Duke University
Aaron (Ronnie) Chatterji, Ph.D. is the Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. His work spans academia, public policy, and business, with numerous peer-reviewed publications and two books. Most recently, he served in the Biden Administration as White House CHIPS coordinator and Acting Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, overseeing the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act implementation. Previously, he was Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce and served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration. Chatterji has received notable research honors including the Kauffman Prize Medal and has published in leading outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review.
Nathan Matias
Cornell University
Dr. J. Nathan Matias is a Guatemalan-American assistant professor at Cornell University's Departments of Communication and Information Science, where he directs the Citizens & Technology Lab. His research focuses on digital governance and behavior change in networks shaped by AI systems, combining insights from social psychology and computer science. Through citizen behavioral science, he collaborates with the public to promote evidence-based and accountable digital power. Dr. Matias is also a co-founder and executive committee member of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.
Lee Tiedrich
Duke University & NIST
Lee Tiedrich is a widely recognized leader in AI, data, and emerging technologies. She is a Senior AI Advisor for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She's also a GPAI/OECD expert, co-chairing GPAI committees on AI and the environment and AI and intellectual property (IP), and a member of the OECD expert group on AI, Data, and Privacy. As GPAI IP co-chair, she successfully led a global GPAI project focused on developing standard contracts to help unlock responsible AI data and model sharing, including for social good. She's also a Senior Adviser for the International Scientific Report on Advanced AI Safety led by Yoshua Bengio and a member of the EU AI Office working group developing AI Codes of Practice. With degree in both electrical engineering and law and over 30 years of legal experience, she has a long career helping organizations navigate uncertainty to achieve their objectives. She was a partner at a global AmLaw 50 law firm, where she led the global and multi-disciplinary AI Initiative and advised on regulatory, corporate, and policy matters. She holds three appointments at Duke University.
Matthew Kenney
Algorithmic Research Group
Matthew Kenney is the Founder and CEO of Algorithmic Research Group, where he leads research on AI agent architectures and benchmarks. In 2023 and 2024, he received grants from Open Philanthropy to pursue his research on agentic AI research and development. In 2023, Matt served as a Visiting Research Fellow in AI Safety at Constellation in Berkeley, California. Previously, Matt worked as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Apple in Machine Intelligence and as an Assistant Research Professor at Duke University. He recently rejoined Duke to teach in the Institute of Enterprise Engineering.
Siobahn Day Grady
North Carolina Central University
Dr. Siobahn Grady, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina A&T State University, is the Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Equity Research (IAIER) at North Carolina Central University. She also serves as an assistant professor and program director of Information Science/Systems, leads the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Equity Research (LAIER), co-directs the Center for Data Equity (CODE), and is an Office e-Learning Faculty Fellow at NCCU. Dr. Grady's research explores artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and STEM participation. She applies machine learning to combat misinformation, improve autonomous vehicle safety, and develop frameworks to eliminate bias in healthcare algorithms. She also studies public perceptions of AI and works to expand STEM education and workforce opportunities, focusing on engagement in technology fields. As IAIER Director, she advances AI research, digital literacy, and workforce readiness, ensuring technology remains effective and accessible.
Matt Perault
Andreessen Horowitz
Matt Perault is the head of AI policy at Andreessen Horowitz. He also currently serves as a senior fellow at the Center on Technology Policy at New York University, and a contributing editor at Lawfare. Prior to joining a16z, he served as the director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill and the director of the Center on Science & Technology Policy at Duke University. Earlier, Matt worked as a director of public policy at Facebook, where he led the company's global policy development team.
Jana Schaich Borg
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.
Neil S Gaikwad
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Neil Gaikwad is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill. He serves on the Faculty Advisory Council of the UNC Parr Center for Ethics and is a Fellow at the MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. Neil holds a Ph.D. in Society-Centered AI from MIT and is an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Neil's research reimagines the alignment of AI and society through the value-sensitive design of human-AI systems that foster trustworthy interactions and adhere to ethical principles in high-stakes decision-making. Published in AI and HCI conferences, this work focuses on critical domains such as public health, climate change, and online platforms, where algorithms are playing an ever-growing role in shaping human lives and societal structures. Neil's scholarship has been recognized with the Facebook Research Fellowship, MIT Engineering Fellowship, Human Rights & Technology Fellowship, Graduate Teaching Award, and the Karl Taylor Compton Prize, MIT's highest student honor. He was also named a Rising Star by Stanford University and the University of Chicago. As a dedicated educator and mentor, Neil has guided over 30 students who have published influential papers on AI fairness, secured prestigious fellowships, and contributed to shaping AI policy through public interest research.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Duke University
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.
Mohit Bansal
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013 and his BTech from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, reasoning and planning agents, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning. He is a AAAI Fellow and recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award, Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, Army Young Investigator Award (YIP), DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), and outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, CoNLL, and TMLR. He has been a keynote speaker for the AACL 2023, CoNLL 2023, and INLG 2022 conferences. His service includes EMNLP and CoNLL Program Co-Chair, and ACL Executive Committee, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, ACL Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair, and Associate/Action Editor for TACL, CL, IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals. Webpage: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/
Emily Wenger
Talk: Reclaiming Data Agency in the Age of Ubiquitous Machine Learning
Dr. Emily Wenger researches security and privacy issues related to machine learning models. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, and before that was a Research Scientist at Meta AI. She graduated with her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2023. Dr. Wenger's research has been featured by numerous media outlets including CNN, NBC, the New York Times, and the BBC, and she has received several awards, including a GFSD fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, and the University of Chicago Harper Dissertation award. She was named to the 2024 Forbes 30 under 30 list for her work on Glaze, a tool that protects artists' work from unwanted use in generative AI models.
Monica Agrawal
Talk: Responsible natural language processing in medicine
Dr. Monica Agrawal is an assistant professor at Duke University, jointly appointed between the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and the Department of Computer Science. Her research tackles diverse challenges including scalable clinical information extraction, smarter electronic health records, and human-AI interaction. She has been named a Duke Whitehead Scholar, a Rising Star in EECS, and a finalist for the AMIA Doctoral Dissertation award. Dr. Agrawal earned her PhD in Computer Science at MIT in 2023 and is also a co-founder of Layer Health.
Ashley Harrell
Talk: Evidence of spillovers from (non)cooperative human-bot to human-human interactions
Ashley Harrell is Assistant Professor of Sociology (and Psychology and Neuroscience, by courtesy) at Duke University. Her research explores the structural and social-psychological determinants of cooperation, collective action, and prosocial behavior. She leads the Sociological Study of Cooperation (SSoC) Lab at Duke. She was previously Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and received her PhD from the University of South Carolina in 2017.
Jon Green
Talk: Using Interviewing Agents to Reconsider Public Opinion
Jon Green is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. His research concerns public opinion and political behavior in the United States, with a focus on the micro- and macro-foundations of political belief systems. He received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 2020, and prior to joining Duke was a Senior Research Scientist at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.
Pardis Emami-Naeini
Talk: A Safe AI-Integrated Society Begins with People and Ends with People
Dr. Pardis Emami-Naeini is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and a Duke Science and Technology Scholar. Her research focuses on developing usable privacy and security solutions that empower individuals from diverse socio-demographic backgrounds to engage in safer and more informed interactions with technology. Her work has been featured by several media outlets such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post and has influenced key organizations, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Consumer Reports, and the World Economic Forum, in creating usable and informative security and privacy labels for smart devices. Dr. Emami-Naeini earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020. She has received the 2024 Google Research Scholar Award and has been recognized as a Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2019) and a CMU CyLab Presidential Fellow (2019 – 2020).
Boyuan Chen
Talk: Achieving Scalable AI Systems with Human-AI Synergy
Dr. Boyuan Chen is an assistant professor at Duke University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Chen is the director of General Robotics Lab and the strategic advisor of robotics and autonomy in the Pratt School of Engineering. Dr. Chen obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University in 2022. His research interests span across robotics, perception, machine learning, human-AI teaming, and AI for science. His research advances embodied intelligence by understanding and designing intelligent systems that learn, act, reason, and adapt through perception and interaction. Ultimately, he hopes that robots and machines can equip with high-level cognitive skills to assist people and unleash human creativity. His work has received numerous media reports and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, Fox, Fortune, Popular Science, and the National Science Foundation.
More speakers to be announced.
Event Schedule
February 28 (Friday) | Karsh Alumni Center
Opening Remarks
Keynote Talk
Keynote Talk
Keynote Talk
Lunch & Poster Session
New Faculty Research Spotlight Talks
Break
Research Spotlight Talks
Closing Remarks
March 1 (Saturday) | Karsh Alumni Center
Opening Remarks
Keynote Book Talk: Moral AI
Keynote Talk
Keynote Talk
Neil S. Gaikwad
Lunch
Networking & Hackathon Kickoff
Closing Remarks
March 2 (Sunday) - Society-Centered AI Hackathon | Penn Pavilion
Hackathon Working Session
Judging and Awards
Closing Remarks
March 3 (Monday) | Penn Pavilion
Opening Remarks
Keynote Talk
Break
Keynote Talk
Hackathon Winner
Break for Lunch
Inaugural Distinguished Lecturer in Society-Centered AI Keynote Talk
Fireside Chat
SCAI Reflections Panel
Mocktail Hour
Organizing Team & Volunteers
Faculty Organizers
- Brinnae Bent
- Chris Bail
Student Support
- Sakshee Patil (AI MEng '25)
- Neha Shukla (CS BS '27)
- Tal Erez (AI MEng '25)
- Ahmed Boutar (AI MEng '25)
- Anastasiia Saenko (MIDS '25)
- Junyu Zhang (FinTech MEng '26)
- Ritu Toshniwal (ECE MS '25)
- Suneel Nadipalli (Alumni)
- Akhil Chintalapati (AI MEng '25)
- John Rohit Ernest (AI MEng '25)
- Srikar Katta (CS PhD '27)
- Enkhjin Purevsukh (BA '26)
- Michael Dankwah Agyeman-Prempeh (DTI MEng '25)