Berkman Klein Center Announces Incoming 2024-2025 Fellows

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University proudly welcomes an extraordinary cohort of fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year.

The cohort will embrace the three pillars of BKC's public programming – AI, social media, and university discourse – and independently research topics that range from AI's role in the worlds of neuropsychiatry, disinformation, and content moderation; to the link between digitization and populist movement; to the changing panorama of extreme speech and internet censorship. The BKC fellowship program uniquely stands out in the academic world for uniting experts from a broad range of experiences, including research, industry, and civil society.

"BKC's fellowship program gathers committed experts with the imagination, skills, and passion to make a difference," said BKC Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain. "Our fellows are testing novel interventions that reinforce technology's responsibility to help human thriving."

The new fellows join a robust legacy – one that fosters interdisciplinary and cross-cultural exchange, and promotes the lifelong connections that have continued to bolster the BKC community for the past 25 years.

"Our fellows engage both on campus and beyond – in ways that embrace the critical questions and natures of their fields and emphasize being expansive, inquisitive, and kind," BKC Director of Community Rebecca Tabasky explained. "This enables them to consider their work from new, previously unperceived angles – to craft ideas and interventions with bolstered potential and promise."

That was the experience of J. Nathan Matias, a fellow from 2013-2014, who went on to hold positions at the Knight First Amendment Institute and found the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University: "The collective expertise and persistent encouragement from the fellowship community inspired me to imagine new directions for my work when I was a fellow – giving me the confidence and support to envision and start building the Citizens and Technology Lab."

As 2022-2023 fellow Juliana Castro Varón, now at The New York Times as its Senior Design Editor in the A.I. Initiatives, states, "The fellowship provided me a year to fully immerse myself in the fast-moving field of AI and collaborate with the BKC community, which played a vital role in propelling me towards my current work."

Added BKC Board members Professors Nien-hê Hsieh and Mark Wu, who chaired the selection committee, "We are pleased to welcome this phenomenal new group of fellows to the BKC community. Their commitment to building tools and practices to tackle emerging challenges reflects BKC's desire to nurture a broad yet exacting range of exploration and creativity. We look forward with optimism and excitement to the important conversations about the future of the internet that their research will transcend and inspire."

Joining the community as 2024-2025 Berkman Klein fellows on September 1, 2024:

Ben Brooks, who is currently Head of Public Policy for Stability AI, brings expertise in regulatory reform for emerging technology. As a fellow, Ben will scrutinize the regulatory and legislative response to generative AI, with a focus on the implications for open-source AI development, distribution, and deployment.

George Chalhoub is an Assistant Professor at University College London and an Associate Member at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Cyber Security from the University of Oxford, where he also completed a postdoctoral position. He has previously worked at Microsoft Research and Nokia Bell Labs. As a fellow, his research will focus on the effectiveness and misuse of copyright takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Vicky Charisi is a research scientist seeking to understand the impact of artificial intelligence and social robots on human behavior with a focus on children's development and their fundamental rights in the context of AI. She works at the intersection of research, policy and design by conducting participatory and experimental field studies. As a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, she will focus on the development of a framework for AI to support children's Global Citizenship Education.

Francisco Marmolejo Cossío is an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Boston College and Director of Partnerships for the EAAMO (Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization) Research Initiative. Francisco is an applied modeling, algorithms, and AI researcher working on societal challenges in public health and access to financial services with the goal of improving access to resources within underserved communities. As a BKC Fellow, Francisco's primary goal is to research and develop practical AI tools aimed at addressing the needs of Mexico's indigenous populations.

Jim Cowie is a serial entrepreneur and data scientist who has been studying Internet measurement and data storytelling for more than 20 years. His research this year focuses on preservation and curation strategies for the datasets that document the Internet's evolution. He is the founder of the Internet History Initiative, and will be a dual fellow of the Berkman Klein Center and the Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab.

Upol Ehsan makes AI systems explainable and responsible so that people who aren't at the table do not end up on the menu. He is a Doctoral Candidate at Georgia Tech and an affiliate at Data & Society. His work has pioneered the field of Human-centered Explainable AI (HCXAI). At BKC, his project—the Algorithmic Imprint—will expand AI accountability and address an intellectual blind spot in Responsible AI by focusing on the unexplored area of harms in the AI’s afterlife (post-decommissioning).

Matt Goerzen is a PhD student in the History of Science at Harvard University. He is primarily interested in the history of computer security, with a particular emphasis on the way non-institutional actors (hackers, activists, hobbyists) have worked to improve safety and security for themselves and their communities—whether by influencing policy or modeling practices. During the fellowship period he aims to gather oral histories from individuals involved in these efforts.

Ryan Y. Kellett is the former VP of Audience at Axios Media. He will study the economic and cultural incentives of social media platforms and the role online creators play in disseminating fact-based journalism. He joins the community as a 2024-2025 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellowship in Journalism Innovation.

Gretchen Krueger is an AI policy researcher focused on increasing accountability in AI development. At the Berkman Klein Center, she will study and map the wider AI and human systems that surround and shape AI, with a focus on understanding the role these wider systems play in AI risks, including risks sometimes framed as AI model risks.

Kevin Liao is a joint J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on legal-technical co-design, which asks how new legal theories and technical systems can help each other "get things right" when it comes to digital security, privacy, and safety. As a fellow, he will explore the legal, technical, and socioeconomic implications of agentic AI systems, with a particular focus on the liability and privacy challenges they present.

Baihan Lin is a professor in AI, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he directs the Bytes of Minds Lab. With a background as a neuroscientist and over a decade of experience as an AI researcher in tech and pharma , Dr. Lin pioneers neuroscience-inspired AI to develop technologies that enhance human-AI and human-human interactions in clinical settings, particularly benefiting neuropsychiatric patients.

Ava Liu will be a joint fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School, and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. She is working on projects examining the relations between technological development, legal institutions, and labor relations in international and domestic markets. Before returning to Harvard Law School, she lived and practiced law in Asia for three years and was a research associate at Oxford University's China, Law and Development Project.

Caio Vieira Machado is a lawyer and social scientist focused on critical issues such as AI fairness, platform regulation, content moderation, and scientific disinformation. He is also a fellow at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, collaborating with mathematicians on machine learning and fairness, and a PhD candidate at Oxford University studying Covid-19 disinformation. He also founded Instituto Vero, where he worked with Brazil's leading social media creators to combat disinformation and influence tech policy.

Gilad Mills is a doctoral student at Harvard Law School who focuses on the intersection of private law and technology, seeking to develop legal tools to redress harm in the digital space through litigation. As a fellow at the BKC, Gilad will further explore private law governance strategies for digital platforms, assessing their benefits and drawbacks compared to direct regulation.

Pariroo Rattan is a PhD candidate at Harvard in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and is doing a secondary field in Music. Her doctoral work is on digitization, populism and the urban poor in India: how does technology policy garner popular support despite its breakdowns on the ground? During her fellowship, she will further explore the moral politics of digitizing identity, payment and welfare systems through ethnography with street vendors in Delhi, and its implications for national politics.

Ben Reininga is the former head of editorial at Snapchat, where worked to create more diverse content experiences, and also partnered with news organizations to fight misinformation, and worked to create a more engaging and diverse content experience. During his fellowship he will focus on the rise of creator journalists on social platforms, identifying responsible ways to harness growing audience interest while maintaining credibility. He joins the community as a 2024-2025 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellowship in Journalism Innovation.

Nick Seaver is an associate professor of Anthropology and director of the program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University. His first book, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, is an ethnographic study of recommender system developers. At the Berkman Klein Center, he will be working on a new book project about the many meanings of attention in contemporary technical cultures.

Ezekiel Kwetchi Takam is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Geneva. He is focused on developing a political theology of artificial intelligence, and exploring how conceptual theological resources can contribute to the critical analysis of the power issues underlying the accelerationist development of advanced AI. As a fellow, he will be working on decentralizing and redistributing power through the demystification or secularization of the "God-like AI" narrative.

Bridget Todd is the creator and host of iHeartRadoio's award winning technology podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, where she explores the intersection of technology and identity. Her miniseries exploring identity based disinformation won a Shorty Award for Best Use of a Podcast Miniseries. At Harvard, she will explore how identity based misinformation proliferates in the podcast and audio space.

Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) and founder of the Center for Digital Dignity. She has published widely on online extreme speech, disinformation, AI and content moderation, decoloniality, digital cultures, and platform governance. During her fellowship, she will explore the growing role of small social media platforms in shaping contentious speech, launching a new cross-national study, and will advance comparative research on encrypted messaging and extreme speech.

Qunfang Wu is a technological activist researcher dedicated to empowering marginalized populations by integrating their voices into the understanding, design, and critique of technology. Her research documents and theorizes resistance at both individual and institutional levels within algorithmic systems. As a fellow, Qunfang will focus on designing interventional and educational tools aimed at supporting algorithm literacy and resistance routines for people in marginalized communities.

Maria Xynou is a digital rights researcher who has worked with the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) since 2016, leading its strategic growth and its global community engagement efforts to investigate and respond to internet censorship around the world. As a fellow, she will carry out a longitudinal study of the changing global internet censorship landscape, while exploring the role of advocacy and circumvention tool groups in responding to emergent censorship events.

Juncheng “Tony” Yang is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the partner at CIVIS Design and Advisory. He conducts research at the Data-Smart City Solutions at the Harvard Bloomberg Center for Cities. His research focuses on the intersection of institutional arrangements and emerging technologies in “smart city” governance.

Jonathan Zong, an incoming 2025 Assistant Professor in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a computer scientist and visual artist who uses design to understand and re-imagine socio-technical systems. In his research, Jonathan partners with blind collaborators and study participants to co-design interfaces for non-visual data exploration. He also develops software and conceptual frameworks for managing the ethics of consent in large-scale social media data collection.

About the Berkman Klein Center

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is dedicated to exploring, understanding, and shaping the development of the digitally-networked environment. A diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, technologists, policy experts, and advocates, we seek to tackle the most important challenges of the digital age while keeping focus on tangible real-world impact in the public interest. Our faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates conduct research, build tools and platforms, educate others, form bridges and facilitate dialogue across and among diverse communities. More information at cyber.harvard.edu.