Kate Crawford

Kate Crawford is a Research Professor of Communication and Science and Technology Studies at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York. Professor Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Over her 20-year career, her work has focused on understanding large-scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment.

Professor Crawford is the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she co-leads the international working group on the Foundations of Machine Learning. In 2021, she received the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. She has been appointed an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She has co-founded multiple interdisciplinary research groups including FATE at MSR, AI Now Institute at NYU, and Knowing Machines at USC. Kate has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Parliament, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the White House.

Her academic research has been published in journals such as Nature, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values and Information, Communication & Society. Beyond academic journals, Professor Crawford has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harpers’ Magazine, among others. Her work also includes collaborative art projects and critical visual design. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler — which maps the full lifecycle of the Amazon Echo — won the Beazley Design of the Year Award in 2019, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A Museum in London. She also collaborated with the artist Trevor Paglen to produce Training Humans at Fondazione Prada's Osservatorio in Milan — the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. Their investigative essay, Excavating.ai, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science.