Assistant Professor
David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, Wired, MIT Technology Review, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running.
PhD, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
BS, Computer Science, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon
- Lucy Suchman, Sireesh Gururaja, David Gray Widder. “Towards interdisciplinarity as critical technical practice” To appear in: Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society.
- David Gray Widder, Sarah Myers West, and Meredith Whittaker. “Why ‘open’ AI systems are actually closed, and why this matters.” Perspective in: Nature, November 2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08141-1
- David Gray Widder and Claire Le Goues. “What is a ‘bug’? On subjectivity, epistemic power, and implications for software research.” In: Communications of the ACM, November 2024. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662730
- David Gray Widder, Laura Dabbish, James Herbsleb, Nikolas Martelaro. “Power and Play: Investigating ‘License to Critique’ in Teams’ AI Ethics Discussions.” In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW), 2024. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686938
AI Ethics
AI Policy
Political Economy of Technology