The Digital Life Initiative (DLI) explores societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology, focusing on ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life.
Our public Digital Life Seminar series resumes in the Fall 2026 semester. For more info, please see our upcoming Schedule or visit our Reflections page.
DLI Dispatch | 2026 Edition
Stay up to date with the latest news from the DLI research community and beyond in our latest issue of DLI Dispatch: Read more >
Critical Reflections I Too Much Annotated Data is Bad. What Can We Do About?
DLI Doctoral Fellow Emma Harvey questions why flawed data annotation practices are undermining AI reliability—and how measurement theory could help fix them. Read more >
Embedded within the progressive teaching mission of Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, the Digital Life Initiative (DLI) was launched in 2017 to analyze the societal tensions arising from existing and emergent digital technologies. Inspired by the core values of justice, democracy, privacy, responsibility, security, and freedom, we support collaborative research projects that explore ethics, policy, politics and quality of life within prevailing socio-technical systems. See below to gain greater insight into the breadth of our research, our visiting fellowships and postdoctoral opportunities, our weekly Digital Life seminar series, and the unique collective of scholars, practitioners and innovators that constitute the DLI Team.
About Us
Research >
Reflections >
For more information about our sponsors & collaborators >
Domain Interests
> Privacy and digital technologies
> AI, automated decision-systems and machine learning
> Big data, big platforms, private enclosure of public data
> Media, polarization, civility, fragmentation, content filtering, automated reputation systems
> Social networks
> Labour, workplace, robotics
> Warfare, automated weapons systems, cyber warfare
> Digital health and well-being
> Ethics and immersive technologies
