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BIO

Kate Mays is a social scientist who studies the dynamics of emergent technology in our civic, social, and intrapersonal lives. Digital technologies like artificial intelligence are increasingly pervasive and opaque, particularly to the public they stand to affect the most. How can we ensure that such powerful tech is developed and deployed in a way that aligns with the public’s values? This question drives her research agenda. With a specific focus on AI and social robots, Kate explores how public and expert opinion can inform pro-social and community-minded technology and policy development. Her research takes a mixed-methods, transdisciplinary approach to better understand these human-centered and social issues that arise from digital technologies. Prior to joining ¶¶Òõ̽̽, Kate was a postdoctoral researcher in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affair’s Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University, where she continues to collaborate on research that employs deliberative methods to explore public attitudes about AI risk and policy. During her graduate studies at Boston University she was a Graduate Student Fellow for computational and data-driven research at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. She also worked with BU’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Media (AIEM) research group on applying computational social science methods to develop solutions for relevant social problems like identifying news bias.

Courses

CDAE 1990: AI for Sustainable Communities

CDAE 2120: CL:Social MediaTheory2Practice

CDAE 4240: SL:Public Comm Capstone

CDAE 6920: Graduate Seminars

Publications

Area(s) of expertise

Human-machine communication, social impact of emerging technologies, human-centered artificial intelligence, AI governance and ethics, mixed methods.