

Digital Life Seminar
Date: 2025 Fall Semester
When: Thursdays (1.25 - 2.40pm). Due to limited space, all guests outside of Cornell Tech are asked to please RSVP beforehand.
Where: Cornell Tech's Bloomberg Center, Room 161.
Convenors: Helen Nissenbaum and Michael Byrne
Queries: Michael Byrne (mjb556@cornell.edu)
About: 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.
For information about
Watch past seminars via
Visit our
Listen to our

DLI Seminars | Fall 2025

Thursday, October 16, 2025 at 5:25:00 PM UTC
Niloofar Mireshghallah
Meta AI’s FAIR Alignment Group
Contextual Privacy in LLMs: Benchmarking and Mitigating Inference-Time Risks
As large language models integrate into daily workflows—from personal assistants to workplace tools—they handle sensitive information from multiple sources yet struggle to reason about what to share, with whom, and when. In this talk, we explore critical gaps in LLMs' privacy reasoning through complementary benchmarks.

Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 5:25:00 PM UTC
Pegah Nokhiz
Cornell Tech
Values and Agency in Algorithmically Optimized Ecosystems
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.

Thursday, October 30, 2025 at 5:25:00 PM UTC
Sterling Chance Williams-Ceci & Matt Franchi
Cornell Tech
DLI Double-Header: Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users' Attitudes on Societal Issues
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.

Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 6:25:00 PM UTC
Alicia Solow-Niederman
George Washington University Law School
Beyond the Supply Chain: Artificial Intelligence’s Demand Side
AI governance underscores the AI “supply chain” and the “many hands” involved in the production of AI systems. Even when it addresses downstream risks, the focus remains on AI's producers. Although invaluable and important, this production-centered approach risks overlooking what happens when real people use AI tools. This paper identifies and theorizes AI governance’s missing half, which I call the “demand side.”

Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 6:25:00 PM UTC
Amy Brand
MIT Press, Director and Publisher
The Future of Knowledge and Publishing
The rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping knowledge production, raising urgent questions for research communication and publishing writ large. Drawing on qualitative survey responses from over 850 academic book authors from across a range of fields and institutions, we highlight widespread concern about the unlicensed use of in-copyright scientific and scholarly publications for AI training. Most authors are not opposed to generative AI, but they strongly favor consent, attribution, and compensation as conditions for use of their work.
Previous Seminars
For more information about our past list of seminar speakers, see the DLI Seminar Archive >
To watch previous seminar series, visit our DLI Media Channel >