People
Professor Herman Cappelen
Professor Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of Philosophy at HKU. He is the Director of the MA programme in AI, Ethics and Society. He is also the Director of AI&Humanity Lab, and on the Steering Committee Member of the Musketeers Institute for Data Science. He earned his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California Berkeley. Cappelen is the author of 11 books, including Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection Communicating with AI: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press). His research focuses on the philosophy of AI, conceptual engineering, the conceptual foundations of political discourse, and externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. He is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europea, and a permanent member of the Institut International de Philosophie.
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Find more information on his work here.
Professor Max Deutsch
Professor Max Deutsch (PhD, Rutgers) is currently Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. His research specializes in the philosophies of language, mind and cognitive science, conceptual engineering, and metaphilosophy.
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Dr. Frank Hong
Dr. Frank Hong is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for AI Safety, and a Postdoctoral Research with the AI&Humanity Lab at the University of Hong Kong. He was recently awarded his PhD from the University of Southern California (USC). He areas of specialization include the philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of AI.
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Dr. Joe Lau
Dr. Joe Lau (PhD, MIT) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and critical thinking. He is author of An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity: Think More, Think Better (Wiley, 2011), and prominent contributor to issues in critical thinking education. In addition, he teaches in the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences Applied AI programme.
Find more information on his work here.
Dr. Nate Sharadin
Dr. Nate Sharadin (PhD, UNC Chapel Hill) is currently a Philosophy Fellow at the Center for AI Safety, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He is author of the book Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained (Routledge, 2022). His work centres on epistemology, value theory, meta-ethics, and the philosophy of AI. His current research on AI includes strategies for evaluative alignment, and capabilities identification.
Find more information on his work here.
Dr. Rachel Katharine Sterken
Dr. Rachel Katharine Sterken (PhD, St Andrews/Oslo) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, and Principal Investigator of the project Meaning and Communication in the Information Age, which looks at how the nature of linguistic meaning and communication have changed because of advances in information technology, AI, and virtual reality. She studies the nature of online speech and manipulation, fake news, and conceptual engineering. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Communicating with AI: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).
Find more information on her work here.
Professor Haochen Sun
Professor Haochen Sun is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He previously served as the Director of the Law and Technology Center and the LLM Program in Technology and Intellectual Property Law at the Faculty of Law. He specializes in intellectual property, technology law, and Chinese law. His recent scholarship focuses on the theoretical and policy foundations of intellectual property, Chinese intellectual property law, and technology law and the public interest. He has won major research grants, and prizes. His most recent book is Technology and the Public Interest (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
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Brian W Tang
Brian W Tang (LLM, NYU; BA/LLB, WAust) is founding executive director of Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab, the award-winning interdisciplinary and experiential programme at HKU’s Faculty of Law (LITE Lab@HKU), Previously a lawyer at a global investment bank in Hong Kong and at leading law firms in New York and Australia, Brian continues his active industry and policy leadership and engagement and has authored chapters on AI in books such as Artificial Intelligence in Finance (2023), The AI Book (2020) and The LegalTech Book (2020) and been invited to contribute to initiatives such as the SMU-Microsoft Asian Dialogue on AI Governance (2020-24) and IEEE’s Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems Policy Committee (2019).
Find more information on his work here.
Professor Scott Veitch
Professor Scott Veitch (LLB PhD, Edinburgh) is Paul K C Chung Professor of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He writes and teaches in the areas of legal, social and political theory. His area of research is jurisprudence broadly defined, and his work draws on historical, philosophical and sociological insights into law and legal institutions. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent book Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021).
Find more information about his work here.
Professor Michael C.L. Chau
Michael Chau is a Professor in Innovation and Information Management in the HKU Business School at the University of Hong Kong. He served as the Warden of Lee Chi Hung Hall (2009-2021) and the Program Director/Coordinator of the BBA (Information Systems) program (2006-2009, 2012-2018). He is also an Honorary Fellow of the HKU-HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention. He received a Ph.D. degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona and a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science (Information Systems) from the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include business analytics, artificial intelligence, web mining and social media, electronic commerce, fintech, smart health, security informatics, human-computer interaction, and IT in education.
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Find more information on his work here.
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Dr. Boris Babic
Boric works primarily in ethics, law, and policy of artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially in medical applications. He also works in Bayesian statistics and epistemology. Formerly, he was an Assistant Professor at INSEAD, both in France and Singapore, and a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Philosophy, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Find more information on his work here.
Dr. David Villena
David teaches in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong and has published on topics in applied ethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, social and political philosophy, and their intersections.
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Before, he taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Lingnan University, where he received a PhD, and was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) and in the School of Philosophy at Antonio Ruiz de Montoya Jesuit University (Lima, Peru). He was also an instructor for civil servants from the Americas, Spain, and Portugal at the Latin American Center for Public Administration and Development (CLAD), and a Visiting Research Scholar in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
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Find more information on his work here.
Dr. Simon Goldstein
Simon is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on AI safety, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Before moving to Hong Kong University, he worked at the Center for AI Safety, the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, and at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He received his BA from Yale, and his PhD from Rutgers, where he wrote a dissertation about dynamic semantics.
Find more information on his work here.
Mr. Adam Au
Adam is the General Counsel and Head of Internal Audit of a multinational corporation. As a certified data privacy expert, he is passionate about data protection, education, the future of work, and the intersection of law, business and technology. He holds an economics degree from Brown, a law degree from Oxford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
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Dr. Roy Chow
Roy (PhD, CUHK) is an Assistant Lecturer (temporary) at the HKU Philosophy Department. His research interests include Wittgenstein’s philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of science. He is currently exploring the Tractarian account of probability, and the logical role of hinge propositions in our thinking.