ABOUT
Sarah has spent the last fifteen years interrogating the role of technology companies and their emergence as powerful political actors on the front lines of international governance. Sarah brings this depth of expertise to policymaking in her current role co-directing AI Now, with a focus on addressing the market incentives and infrastructures that shape tech’s role in society at large and ensuring it serves the interests of the public. Her forthcoming book, Tracing Code (University of California Press) draws on years of historical and social science research to examine the origins of data capitalism and commercial surveillance.
Sarah’s award-winning research is featured in leading academic journals and prominent media platforms including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Financial Times, Nature and the Wall Street Journal. She regularly advises members of Congress, the White House, European Commission, UK Government, Consumer Financial Protection Board and other US and international regulatory agencies and the City of New York, and has testified before Congress on issues including artificial intelligence, competition and data privacy.
She recently completed a term as a Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, where she advised the Agency on the role of artificial intelligence in shaping the economy by working on competition and consumer protection matters. She currently serves on the OECD’s AI Futures Working Group, and has affiliations as a Visiting Research Scientist at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and at Cornell University’s Citizens and Technology Lab. She holds Doctoral and Masters Degrees from the University of Southern California, where she was the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Research Fellow, and has received Google Policy and New America Cybersecurity Fellowships, as well as a Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship.
RECENT WORK
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Radical Infrastructure. New Media and Society.
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Cryptography as Information Control. Social Studies of Science.
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Social Media as Social Infrastructure. The Social Media Debate: Unpacking the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Effects of Social Media Platforms.
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Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race and Power in AI. AI Now Institute.
Best Paper Award 2020
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Censored, Suspended, Shadowbanned: Researching User Experiences of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms. New Media & Society.
FEATURED IN
SELECTED
TALKS
STOPPING BIG TECH FROM MONOPOLIZING THE FUTURE
Anti-Monopoly Summit, May 2023
LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS, LAW, AND POLICY
New York University Law School, July 2023
AUTOMATED DECISIONMAKING SYSTEMS
PrivacyCon 2022, Federal Trade Commission, Nov. 2022
LABOR LAW AND AI
The Race to Regulate AI, Oxford University, June 2022
DISCRIMINATING SYSTEMS
National Science Policy Network Annual Symposium, Nov. 2020
Indiana Informatics Colloquium Series, University of Indiana, Sept. 2020
Gender Equality Academy Series, European Union Horizon 2020, July 2020
Ethics and Technological Futures Lecture Series, Georgia Tech, Feb. 2020
The Humanistic Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence Lecture Series, Carleton College, Jan. 2020
Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series, McGill University, Sept. 2019
Equity, Diversity and Data Science in Genomics Workshop, National Human Genome Research Institute, Sept. 2019
Women in Tech Roundtable Series, University of California Berkeley, June 2019; Microsoft FATE Research Group, May 2019
SURVEILLANCE, CENSORSHIP, & HUMAN RIGHTS ONLINE
Munk School of Global Affairs ,University of Toronto, Mar. 2017