Machines, Minds, and Morality: Ethics in a Changing Technological World

David J. Farber

Professor Farber is co-Director of the Cyber Civilization Research Center at Keio University (Tokyo) and American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow. He was the Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University with secondary appointments at the Heinz School and EPP prior to his retirement. He is also the Adjunct Professor of Internet Studies in SCS and Adjunct Professor in EPP, and a Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute of Technology.

In 2003, he retired from the University of Pennsylvania where he holds the Alfred Fitler Moore Emeritus Professor of Telecommunication Systems and held appointments in the Engineering School and the Wharton School. His background includes roles at Bell Labs, the Rand Corporation, Xerox Data Systems, University of California at Irvine, and the University of Delaware.

From 2000 to 2001, he served as Chief Technologist for the Federal Communications Commission. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) and the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Prior to his appointment to the FCC, he served on the U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee of Information Technology.

He was awarded the SIGCOMM Award for life-long contributions to communications and the City of Philadelphia’s John Scott award for Contributions to Humanity as well as an Honorary Doctorate from Stevens Institute of Technology. He has also been recognized as a Pioneer of the Internet Society Hall of Fame. 

Sorelle Friedler, Ph.D.

Sorelle Friedler is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Haverford College and an Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. Her research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational geometry, data mining and machine learning, and the application of such algorithms to interdisciplinary data.

Sorelle is the Program Committee Co-chair for the new Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) and is one of the organizers of the Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT/ML). She has received a Fellowship and recent NSF grant for her work on preventing discrimination in machine learning. Her work on this topic has been featured in IEEE Spectrum, Gizmodo, and NBC News and she has been interviewed about algorithmic fairness by the Guardian, Bloomberg, and NPR.

Sorelle is the recipient, along with chemistry professors Josh Schrier and Alex Norquist, of two NSF Grants to apply data mining techniques to materials chemistry data to speed up materials discovery. Their paper on this work was featured on the cover of Nature and was covered by The Wall Street Journal and Scientific American.

Before Haverford, Sorelle was a software engineer at Alphabet (formerly Google), where she worked in the X lab and in search infrastructure. She received a Ph.D. in computer science in 2010 and an M.S. in computer science in 2007, both from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a 2004 graduate of Swarthmore College.

Bilita Mattes, Ed.D.

Bilita Mattes is the Executive Director (and founding member) of the STEM-UP Network, a social enterprise powered by Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. STEM-UP is a community that supports women in STEM to persist, thrive, and advance. She also serves as the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Harrisburg University. She has 25 years of experience with leadership roles in higher education, including responsibilities such as program development, faculty development, and academic outreach and strategic partnerships.