Widely known for her pioneer research at the intersection of science, technology, and politics, Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study. From 2021–23, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is the past president of the Social Science Research Council and the first Social Science Dean at Columbia University. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI.

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, 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.

In conversation with Anthropology Assistant Professor Beth Semel, Princeton University

Alondra Nelson's recent publications:

"AI Safety on Whose Terms?" (Seth Lazar and Alondra Nelson)

"Introduction: Future Texts" (Alondra Nelson)

"Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights" (developed by a team led by Dr. Nelson)

Alex Hanna's recent publications:

"Bringing the People Back In: Contesting Benchmark Machine Learning Datasets" (Emily Denton, Alex Hanna, Razvan Amironesei, Andrew Smart, Hilary Nicole, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman)

Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness (Alex Hanna, Emily Denton, Andrew Smart, Jamila, Smith-Loud)

"Auto-essentialization: Gender in automated facial analysis as extended colonial project" (Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Madeleine Pape, and Alex Hanna)