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.

Find more information about his work here.

 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.

Find more information about his work here.

 Dr. Janet Hsiao 

Dr. Janet Hsiao (PhD, Edinburgh) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Steering Committee Member of the Musketeers Institute of Data Science. Before joining HKU, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center at the University of California San Diego. Her research interests are in learning and visual cognition where she adopts an interdisciplinary approach, using a variety of techniques from AI, experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience.

Find more information on her work here.

 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).

Find more information about his work here.

Dr. Matthew McKeever

Matthew (PhD, St Andrews) teaches in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong. His work centers on philosophy of language, philosophy of technology, and their intersections. He has published on a range of philosophical topics including language, metaphilosophy, and metaphysics, and is currently working on notions of linguistic meaning that we can use when thinking about AI (particularly language models).

Find more information about 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.

 Dr. Brian Wong 

Dr. Brian Wong (DPhil in Politics, Oxford) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, specialising in political and moral philosophy. His research examines the nature of political responsibilities of citizens under non-democratic contexts, how state and individual actors respond to historical and structural injustices, and the intersection of philosophy and public policy. 

 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.

 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.

Dr. Chris J Atkinson

Chris currently teaches philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University. His research interests include philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. He received his PhD from Lingnan University in 2018.