Gillian Hadfield

Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at USC
Author of Rules for a Flat World

Gillian Hadfield holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. Now based at the University of Southern California, she teaches courses in legal innovation and design, the origins and evolution of the law, and contract law and strategy. She is a leading proponent of the reform and redesign of legal systems for a rapidly changing world facing tremendous challenge from globalization and technology. Her extensive research examines how to make law more accessible, effective, and capable of fulfilling its role in balancing innovation, growth, and fairness. Prof. Hadfield is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values and Policy and co-curates the Forum’s Transformation Map for Justice and Legal Infrastructure. She was appointed in 2017 to the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education, serves as Director of the USC Center for Law and Social Science and is a member of the World Justice Project’s Research Consortium. Her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2016.

You can read more about Prof. Hadfield’s work and accomplishments at her website.

Siddharth Srivastava

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University

Siddharth Srivastava is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, Prof. Srivastava was a Staff Scientist at the United Technologies Research Center in Berkeley. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the RUGS group at the University of California Berkeley. His research objective is to develop intelligent robots and software agents that assist humans in their daily lives. Towards this objective, his research focuses on developing formal frameworks, algorithms and implementations that allow autonomous agents to reason and act efficiently under uncertainty. His dissertation work received a Best Paper award at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) and an Outstanding Dissertation award from the Department of Computer Science at UMass Amherst.

You can read more about Prof. Srivastava’s work and accomplishments at his website.

Alison Gopnik

Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley
Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of cognitive science and of children’s learning and development and was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind”, an originator of the “theory theory” of children’s development and more recently introduced the idea that probabilistic models and Bayesian inference could be applied to children’s learning. She has held a Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, the Moore Distinguished Scholar fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, the All Souls College Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Oxford, and King’s College Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge. She is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has been continuously supported by the NSF and was PI on a 2.5 million dollar interdisciplinary collaborative grant on causal learning from the McDonnell Foundation.

She is the author or coauthor of over 100 journal articles and several books including “Words, thoughts and theories” MIT Press, 1997, and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books “The Scientist in the Crib” William Morrow, 1999, “The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life”, and “The Gardener and the Carpenter”, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, the latter two won the Cognitive Development Society Best Book Prize in 2009 and 2016. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others. Her TED talk on her work has been viewed more than 3 million times. And she has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” and “The Colbert Report”. Since 2013 she has written the Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Alvy Ray Smith, and has three children and three grandchildren.

Charis Thompson

Chancellor's Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley

Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at the University of California, Berkeley; and Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current book in progress, Getting Ahead, focuses on minds, bodies, and emotions in an age of populism and technology elites. Getting Ahead is the third in her book series on technology and democracy. The first, Making Parents (2005), won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and examined gender, race, and agency in relation to reproductive technologies. The second book, Good Science (2013), examined the geopolitics and bioethics of pro-cures innovation economies. Thompson served on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Group on Genome Editing, and currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Council on Technology, Values, and Policy, as well as UC Berkeley’s Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Race and Gender. She is a recipient of the Social Science Division Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2017 received an Honorary Doctorate from the Norwegian Science and Technology University.

Dawn Song

Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Dawn Song is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research interest lies in deep learning and security. She has studied diverse security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks, including areas ranging from software security, networking security, distributed systems security, applied cryptography, blockchain and smart contracts, to the intersection of machine learning and security. She is the recipient of various awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, the Faculty Research Award from IBM, Google and other major tech companies, and Best Paper Awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning. She is a winner of the AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award, as the most cited scholar in Computer Security. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley as a faculty, she was a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2007.

You can read more about Prof. Song’s work and accomplishments here.

Demian Pouzo

Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley

Demian Pouzo is an associated professor in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. Demian joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2009 as an assistant professor after receiving his PhD in Economics from NYU. He also holds an MA and BA in Economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina). Pouzo’s research interests include econometrics as well as other fields such as economic theory and macroeconomics.

John Zysman

Professor Emeritus in Political Science at UC Berkeley

John Zysman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on European and Japanese political economy, policy and corporate strategy.

His most recent articles include:

The Next Phase in the Digital Revolution: Abundant Computing, Platforms, Growth and Employment in February 2018 CACM
Intelligent Tools and Digital Platforms: Implications for Work and Employment in Intereconomics Review of European Economic Policy (Issue 6 2017)
The Rise of the Platform Economy In NAS Issues in Science and Technoogy, Spring 2016
Entrepreneurial Finance in the Era of Intelligent Tools and Digital Platforms: Implications and Consequences for Work

Recent books include:

The Third Globalization: Can Wealthy Countries Stay Rich Ed. with Dan Brezniz (Oxford University Press 2013)
Can Green Sustain Growth: From the Religion to the Reality To Sustainable Prosperity Ed. with Mark Huberty (Stanford Unversity Press. 2013)

Earlier books include:

The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Oxford University Press, 1992)
Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (Basic Books, 1987)
Governments, Markets, and Growth: Finance and the Politics of Industrial Change (Cornell University Press, 1983)

Juliana Schroeder

Assistant Professor of Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley

Juliana Schroeder researches how people navigate their social worlds: first, how people form inferences about others’ mental states and mental capacities and, second, how these inferences influence their interactions.

Juliana’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Psychological Science. It has been featured by outlets such as the New York Times, Newsweek, NBC, and the Today Show, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Juliana received her B.A. in psychology and economics from The University of Virginia. She received a M.A. in social psychology and advanced methods from the University of Chicago, and an M.B.A. from The Chicago Booth School of Business. Her Ph.D. is in Psychology and Business from the University of Chicago. Juliana is currently an Assistant Professor at the Berkeley Haas School of Business.

You can read more about Prof. Schroeder’s work and accomplishments here.

Ken Goldberg

Professor and Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at UC Berkeley

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and UC Berkeley Professor focusing on robotics. He was appointed the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering and serves as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. He has secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information, and Radiation Oncology at the UCSF Medical School. Ken is Director of the CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative and the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB where he and his students pursue research in machine learning for robotics and automation in warehouses, homes, and operating rooms. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing and the first robot on the Internet. Despite agonizingly slow progress, he persists in trying to make robots less clumsy. He has over 250 peer-reviewed publications and 8 U.S. Patents. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Ken’s artwork has appeared in 70 exhibits including the Whitney Biennial and films he has co-written have been selected for Sundance and nominated for an Emmy Award. Ken was awarded the NSF PECASE (Presidential Faculty Fellowship) from President Bill Clinton in 1995, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005 and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.

You can read more about Prof. Goldberg’s work and accomplishments here.

Lara Buchak

Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Lara Buchak is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 2009. Her primary research interests are in decision, game, and rational choice theory. Her book Risk and Rationality (Oxford 2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. It vindicates the ordinary decision-maker from the point of view of even ideal rationality. She is currently working on applications of this work to central questions in ethics, including the question of how resources in a society should be distributed and the question of when one is allowed to take a risk that affects other people. Other topics she has written on include the relationship between assigning probability to a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis outright, and the conditions under which one ought to stop one’s search for evidence.

Mariano Florentino Cuéllar

Chair, Board of the Directors at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Formerly Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford University

Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar was nominated by Governor Jerry Brown and began serving on the California Supreme Court in January 2015. A naturalized U.S. citizen born in Northern Mexico, Cuéllar received a B.A. from Harvard magna cum laude, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. Before serving on the Court, he was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science at Stanford University. A member of the Stanford faculty since 2001, Cuéllar has written books and articles on administrative law and legislation, criminal law, international law, cyberlaw, immigration, public health law, and the history of institutions. Between 2004 and 2015, Cuéllar also held leadership positions at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. During his tenure leading the Institute and, earlier, its Center for International Security and Cooperation, Cuéllar grew the Institute’s faculty, expanded Stanford’s role in nuclear security research, launched university-wide initiatives on global poverty and cyber security, and broadened opportunities for student and faculty research abroad. You can read more about Justice Cuéllar’s work and accomplishments here or here.

Marion Fourcade

Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley

Marion Fourcade received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other recent research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; the moral regulation of states; the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet). A final book-length project, Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will examine the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call “national classificatory styles” across a range of empirical domains.

Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016).

You can read more about Prof. Fourcade’s work and accomplishments here.

Michael Littman

Professor of Computer Science at Brown University

Michael Lederman Littman works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is currently a professor of computer science at Brown University.

Before graduate school, Michael worked with Thomas Landauer at Bellcore and was granted a patent for one of the earliest systems for Cross-language information retrieval. Michael received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a professor at Duke University. During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at AT&T. From 2002 to 2012, he was a professor at Rutgers University; he chaired the department from 2009-12. In Summer 2012 he returned to Brown University as a full professor.

Niko Kolodny

Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Niko Kolodny is Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He works in moral and political philosophy. He has written on the ethical significance of personal relationships and the nature of rationality, especially instrumental rationality. More recent papers focus on the value of democracy, the justification of the state, and the future of humanity. He has designed a new course for both philosophy and data science majors, “Moral Questions of Data Science,” which explores, among other things, the implications of replacing human judgment in social decision-making with statistical inference and automated algorithms.