- Summit on AI and Democracy
from Harvard University's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
About the Event
Join us in Person at Harvard Kennedy SChool
The Summit on AI and Democracy will gather experts across multiple institutions to discuss ongoing research, policy, and development efforts related to the recent advancements in artificial intelligence. The Summit is hosted by the GETTING-Plurality Research Network, which is a part of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation housed at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
The Summit will be composed of various lightning talks and breakout groups, with a focus on the following topics:
- The opportunities and challenges that technologies, such as AI, pose to democracy, and how we might govern these systems.
- Research and emerging methods for incorporating greater democratic input into the development of AI.
- New developments and tools in support of democracy, plurality, and collective intelligence– explorations for how we might use these innovations for good.
For any inquiries please reach out to Sarah Hubbard at sarah_hubbard@hks.harvard.edu.
Agenda
TIME SESSION SPEAKERS
| 8:00–9:00 | Breakfast available | |
| 9:00–9:30 | Introduction and kick-off |
|
| 9:30–10:30 | Lightning Talks: AI Governance and AI for Democracy |
|
| 10:30–10:50 | Small Group Discussion | |
| 10:50–11:00 | Break | |
| 11:00–11:40 | Lightning Talks: Democratic Inputs and Deliberative Methods |
|
| 11:40–12:00 | Small Group Discussion | |
| 12:00–1:10 | Lunch | |
| 1:00–1:50 | Panel: Foundation Models and Democracy |
|
| 1:50–2:40 | Lightning Talks: Advancing Plurality |
|
| 2:40–3:00 | Break | |
| 3:00–3:40 | Breakout Groups | |
| 4:30–4:45 | Announcements and next steps |
|
| 4:45–5:00 | Concluding remarks |
|
| 5:00–8:00 | Plurality Institute Reception |
MEET THE SPEAKERS
Danielle Allen
Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, distinguished author, and mom. See more.
Allison Stanger
Allison Stanger is Co-Director, GETTING-Plurality Research Network, Harvard University; Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative; and an External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute. Stanger’s next book, Who Elected Big Tech? is forthcoming with Yale University Press. From November 2023 through January 2024, she will be a visiting scholar at Stanford’s HAI. See more.
Archon Fung
Archon Fung is the Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. See more.
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. See more.
Eric Beerbohm
Eric Beerbohm is the Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a Professor of Government at Harvard University. His philosophical and teaching interests include democratic theory, theories of distributive justice, and the philosophy of social science. His latest book project, Gaslighting Citizens, examines how politicians can target our evidence about our evidence, and concludes that this form of manipulation raises distinctively democratic worries. See more.
Beth Noveck
Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The GovLab. She is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. See more.
Tina Eliassi-Rad
Tina Eliassi-Rad is the inaugural President Joseph E. Aoun Professor at Northeastern University. She is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Tina works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and network science and is interested in the impacts of science and technology on society. See more.
Wes Chow
Wes Chow is a staff researcher at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, housed at the MIT Media Lab, working on decentralized social systems and designs for healthy online and in-person dialogue networks. He previously investigated social networks and served as CTO for MIT CCC’s deployment non-profit, Cortico. Prior to MIT, Wes had a career in startups (Chartbeat, Songza), and built some of the earliest automated trading systems.
Glen Weyl
E. (Eric) Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead of the Microsoft Research Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory, Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, the leading thinktank in the Web3 space, and Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute, which coordinates an academic research network developing technology for cooperation across difference. See more.
Aviv Ovadya
Aviv researches and supports tractable processes for technology governance and alignment, building on validated methods from offline deliberative democracy and innovative AI augmented deliberation technology. He is affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center (RSM), a visiting researcher at Cambridge University’s Center for the Future of Intelligence, and consults for technology companies, civil society organizations, and funders.
Sarah Hubbard
Sarah Hubbard is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where she is focused on emerging technology, policy, and democracy. She is a product leader and technologist who has led various cross-functional teams at both Apple and Microsoft building products centered around artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent devices. See more.
Amy Larsen
Amy serves as Director of Strategy and Business Management of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward team, where she leads the team’s strategy on cybersecurity, information integrity, election integrity, journalism, and corporate civic engagement. She also leads the team’s international engagement and supports the company’s Ukraine Task Force.
Shrey Jain
Shrey Jain is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft Research Special Projects and co-founder of the Plural Technology Collaboratory. Shrey‘s research is centered on designing both cryptographic and AI tools to instill confidence tools in communication that are resilient to challenges from generative AI. See more.
Divya Siddarth
Divya Siddarth is the co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, an experimental research organization that advances collective intelligence capabilities for the democratic and effective governance of transformative technologies.
Seth Lazar
Seth Lazar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and a member of the Executive Committee of the ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference. See more.
Hélène Landemore
Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University with a specialization in political theory. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. See more.
Deep Ganguli
Deep Ganguli is a research scientist at Anthropic focusing on the interpretability, fairness, transparency, and societal impacts of AI. Prior to joining Anthropic, he was director of research programs at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), as well as a science program officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. See more.
Madeleine Daepp
Madeleine is a researcher who studies the deployment of novel technologies in shared public spaces. Her past work includes a collaborative deployment of the Eclipse network, one of the largest low-cost air quality sensing networks in the United States, and working with residents of nine Boston neighborhoods to map common trajectories of displacement.
Uma Ilavarasan
Uma Ilavarasan is a PhD Candidate in Government at Harvard University and a Malcom Wiener Research Fellow in Poverty and Justice in the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy. Her dissertation research focuses on the production of identity documents — the political processes that shape their development and the characteristics of the objects that result.
Kasia Sitkiewicz
Kasia Sitkiewicz is the Staff Product Manager leading growth for GitHub products including Copilot. She is the product partner of Microsoft Research’s Special Project Team the Plural Technology Collaboratory, where she leads work on Gov4Git, a platform for governing open source projects that provides the foundation for the forthcoming collaborative book project Plurality in collaboration with the Digital Minister in Taipei, Audrey Tang.
Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books — including A Hacker’s Mind — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. See more.
Puja Ohlhaver
Puja Ohlhaver is a lawyer, innovator, and technologist in healthcare and web3. She was a member of the Harvard Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics Rapid Response Task Force on Covid-19 and is co-author with Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin of “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.” See more.
Kinney Zalesne
Kinney Zalesne is a former General Manager of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft, where she also served as the point-person for the company’s racial equity initiative in 2020-21. She is also the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book and regular Wall Street Journal column “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes”. See more.
Shlomit Wagman
Dr. Wagman is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard Law School and a Research Fellow at the M-RCBG at the Kennedy School of Government. Until 2022, she was the Director-General of the Israel Anti-Money Laundering and Terror Financing Authority (IMPA), a financial regulator and law enforcement agency. See more.
Vivian Chen
Vivian is a human rights activist with a focus on women’s rights, children’s rights, and democracy. She was the official APEC delegate in Policy Partnership of Women and Economy, representing Chinese Taipei from 2017 to 2020. Vivian now heads the Taiwan chapter of Girls in Tech, a non-profit that mentors women and girls in tech industry. She is a core contributor at da0 and g0v, a polycentric civic tech community, leading efforts on plurality.
Alex Pascal
Alex Pascal is a Senior Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Alex has served for over a decade as a national security and domestic policymaker in the United States Government, including seven years at the White House. His current research focuses on governance and policy for artificial intelligence. See more.
Luke Thorburn
Luke Thorburn is a PhD candidate in computer science at King’s College London. His core interests lie at the intersection of AI, epistemology, and conflict. In particular, his current work focuses on the use of recommender systems to mitigate conflict risks. He also co-authors the Understanding Recommenders project at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley.
Nick Pyati
Nick Pyati leads strategy for the Windows + Devices organization at Microsoft, and before that was a member of the Corporate Strategy team. Before Microsoft, he was an attorney in the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice.
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For any questions, please reach out to Sarah Hubbard at sarah_hubbard@hks.harvard.edu.
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