People

Laura DeNardis, Ph.D., is the inaugural endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society in Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences. She holds appointments as Professor in the department of Communication, Culture and Technology and Research Professor in the Center for Digital Ethics. A scholar of Internet governance, her book The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press) was recognized as a Financial Times Top Technology Book of 2020. Among her seven books, The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press), is widely considered the definitive source for understanding power struggles over technical infrastructure.

DeNardis joined Georgetown from American University, where she received the university’s highest faculty honor, Scholar-Teacher of the Year. She previously served as the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project and the appointed Director of Research for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She also served as an appointed member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy and is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Professor DeNardis holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, an MEng from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.

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Will Fleisher is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. He is also affiliated with Georgetown’s Center for Digital Ethics and the Initiative on Tech & Society. His areas of specialization are in the ethics of AI and in epistemology. Will’s research concerns the ethical, political, and epistemic implications of contemporary and near-term AI systems, particularly those developed using machine learning techniques. He has written about algorithmic fairness and explainable AI. He also maintains a research program in the epistemology of inquiry. His work has been published in AAAI/ACM conference proceedings and in leading philosophy journals, including Noûs, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy of Science. Before coming to Georgetown, Will was a postdoctoral fellow in the Experiential AI program at Northeastern University and a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University.

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Meg is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy, memory, innovation, and automation in digital information and computing technologies. She’s also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab, and visiting faculty at the Brussels Privacy Hub at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Meg’s research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology. Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten, Meg’s first book, is about the social, legal, and technical issues surrounding digital oblivion. Her second book project, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy,tells the transatlantic history of digital consent through the lens of a familiar technical object. She is also editing a volume with Amanda Levendowski called Feminist Cyberlaw thatexplores how gender, race, sexuality and disability shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. More details about her work can be found at MegLeta.com and iSPYlab.net.

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Calvin Newport is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His academic research focuses on the theory of distributed systems, with an emphasis on proving fundamental limits in exotic and dynamic systems, including those found in nature. He also writes about the intersection of technology and culture for a general audience. He is the author of seven books, including multiple New York Times bestsellers, that have been published in over 35 languages. His most recent titles are A World Without Email (2021), Digital Minimalism (2019), and Deep Work (2016). Newport is also a Contributing Writer for the New Yorker, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and WIRED magazine. Before coming to Georgetown, Newport earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

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Professor Chander is an expert on the global regulation of new technologies. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he clerked for Chief Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He practiced law in New York and Hong Kong with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He has been a visiting law professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, and Tsinghua. He previously served as the Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. A member of the American Law Institute, he has also served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, where he co-founded the International Law and Technology Interest Group. The author of The Electronic Silk Road (Yale University Press), he serves as a judge of the Stanford Junior International Faculty Forum. A recipient of Google Research Awards and an Andrew Mellon grant on the topic of surveillance, he has served on ICTSD/World Economic Forum expert groups on the digital economy. He serves as an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Policy, a faculty advisor to Georgetown’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, and as a faculty affiliate of Yale’s Information Society Project.

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Professor Cohen teaches and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012), and numerous articles and book chapters, and she is a co-author of Copyright in a Global Information Economy (Wolters Kluwer, 5th ed. 2020). She is a faculty co-director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy, a faculty advisor of the Center on Privacy and Technology, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Prior to joining the Law Center faculty in 1999, Professor Cohen was Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She previously practiced with the San Francisco firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation. She was law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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Dr. Little is Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown, and the founder and Director of Ethics Lab, a unique team of philosophers and designers that develops new methods to build ethical frameworks that better address real-world problems. Ethics Lab brings together deep ethical expertise with creative methods from Design to teach students and empower experts to address the most urgent issues of our time to responsibly shape the future. Ethics Lab works in three primary ways:

1. Innovate and deliver new cutting edge courses in the areas that programs and learners need next
2. Infuse ethics across the curriculum through our Embedded Ethics program
3. Provide ethics-centered consultation and facilitation to research, policy, and industry teams

Dr. Little is a Rhodes Scholar and fellow of the Hastings Center, she has twice served as Visiting Scholar in residence at the National Institutes of Health Department of Bioethics, and was appointed to the Ethics Committee of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is co-founder of The Second Wave Initiative, which works to promote responsible research into the health needs of pregnant women.

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Mark Maloof is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, on-line learning algorithms, concept drift, and applications of machine learning and data mining to computer security. He has taught the department’s introductory courses as well as upper-class and graduate courses on artificial intelligence and on machine learning. Mark led the effort that established Georgetown’s first graduate programs in computer science, and served as the first director of the department’s master’s and Ph.D. programs. He has served as a consultant to industry, government, and nonprofit organizations.

Mark’s recent research has included: a Bayesian approach to concept drift, paired learners for concept drift, ensemble methods for concept drift, detecting insider threats, applications of machine learning to detecting unknown malicious executables, learners with partial instance memory, analysis of algorithms using ROC components of variance, machine learning for improving building detection in overhead imagery.

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Dewey Murdick is the Director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Prior to joining CSET as its founding Director of Data Science, he was the Director of Science Analytics at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where he led metric development, data science, and machine-learning and statistical research for Meta and science-related initiatives. Dewey served as Chief Analytics Officer and Deputy Chief Scientist within the Department of Homeland Security. At IARPA, he led program managers and programs in high-risk, high-payoff research in support of national security missions.

Dewey has also held positions in intelligence analysis, research, software development, and contract teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia and a B.S. in Physics from Andrews University. He is the recipient of the DHS Under Secretary’s Award for Outstanding Collaboration, ODNI’s Exceptional Achievement Award, the Distinguished Analysis Award for Excellence in Intelligence Community Collaboration and Analytic Insight, and the National Ground Intelligence Center Commander’s Civilian of the Year Award.

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Kobbi Nissim is a Professor and Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Term Chair in Computer Science and an Affiliate Professor at Georgetown Law. Before Joining Georgetown he was at the Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University.

Professor Nissim studied at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Prof. Moni Naor. His research interests include working towards establishing rigorous practices for privacy in computation: identifying problems that result from the collection, sharing, and processing of information and formalizing these problems and studying them towards creating solid practices and technological solutions. He is particularly interested in intersection points between privacy and various disciplines within and outside computer science including cryptography, machine learning, game theory, complexity theory, algorithmics, statistics, databases, and more recently privacy law and policy.

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Paul Ohm specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. He is a professor at Georgetown Law and serves as a faculty director for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown. In his work, Professor Ohm tries to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science, focusing on how evolving technology disrupts individual privacy. From 2012 to 2013, he served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, and is commonly cited and quoted by news organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Ohm began his academic career on the faculty of the University of Colorado Law School. Before becoming a professor, he served as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and clerked for judges in the United States Court of Appeals and the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law and Yale University. Professor Ohm blogs at Freedom to Tinker.

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Kimberly Sellers, Ph.D. is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, specializing in Statistics. Professor Sellers held previous faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Senior Scholar at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB). Her areas of interest and expertise are in generalized statistical methods involving count data that contain data dispersion; and in image analysis techniques, particularly low-level analyses including preprocessing, normalization, feature detection, and alignment. She is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow in the American Statistical Association and the inaugural chairperson of the American Statistical Association’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Outreach Group.

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Micah Sherr is the Callahan Family Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Georgetown University. His academic interests include privacy-preserving technologies, electronic voting, wiretap systems, and network security. He participated in two large-scale studies of electronic voting machine systems, and helped to disclose numerous architectural vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems. His current research examines the security properties of legally authorized wiretap (interception) systems and investigates methods for achieving scalable, high-performance anonymous routing. Micah received his B.S.E., M.S.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.

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Dr. Lisa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Research Professor in the Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown University.  She has authored/co-authored over 70 peer reviewed publications and book chapters related to data-centric computing, i.e. data mining, data privacy, data visualization, and data science. Her interdisciplinary research has been supported by NSF, ONR, DARPA, and SSHRC. 

Dr. Singh’s current projects include learning from public, open source big data to advance social science research involving the understanding of human behavior and opinion, identifying and quantifying noise and poor-quality information on social media, developing methods and tools to better understand forced movement due to conflict, and studying privacy on the web.  Dr. Singh has also recently organized three NITRD and NSF sponsored workshops involving future directions of big data research and is currently involved in different organizations working on increasing participation of women in computing and integrating computational thinking into K-12 curricula.

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Nitin Vaidya is the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown. He received Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Vaidya previously served as an Associate Head and Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has co-authored papers that received awards at several conferences. He is a fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Vaidya has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM PODC conference, as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as the Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R.

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