Recommendation systems are now used in high-stakes settings, including to help find jobs, schools, and partners. Building public interest recommender systems in such settings bring both individual-level (enabling exploration, diversity, data quality) and societal (fairness, capacity constraints, algorithmic monoculture) challenges.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

Having just completed her PhD in Computer Science at Brown University (advised by Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian), Pegah Nokhiz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative, Cornell Tech. She was an affiliate of Brown's Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign (CNTR) at the Data Science Institute.

Angelina Wang is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her research is in the area of responsible AI. Wang’s publications have addressed topics such as the societal impacts of AI; evaluation of AI systems; and how to move beyond one-size-fits-all, mathematically convenient notions of fairness.

Niloofar Mireshghallah is a Research Scientist at Meta AI’s FAIR Alignment group in San Francisco. Beginning Fall 2026, she will join Carnegie Mellon University’s Engineering & Public Policy (EPP) Department and Language Technologies Institute (LTI) as an Assistant Professor.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

Professor Solow-Niederman’s scholarship sits at the intersection of law and technology. Her research focuses on how to regulate emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, in a way that reckons with social, economic, and political power. With an emphasis on algorithmic accountability, data governance, and information privacy, Professor Solow-Niederman explores how digital technologies can both challenge longstanding regulatory approaches and expose underlying legal values.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

Brian Christian is an acclaimed author and researcher whose work explores the human implications of computer science. He is best known for his bestselling series of books: The Most Human Human, Algorithms to Live By, and The Alignment Problem, which was recently named among the five best books about artificial intelligence by The New York Times.