Meet The Team

Rachel Katharine Sterken 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).

Jackie Kay is dual-affiliated as a Research Engineer at DeepMind and PhD  student at the UCL AI Centre, supervised by Marc Deisenroth and Shakir  Mohamed. They have nine years of technical accomplishments in robotics and machine learning, from controlling autonomous sidewalk delivery  robots, dexterous robotic hands, and simulated nuclear fusion tokamaks, to conducting robotics and interpretability experiments for Gato, Deepmind’s generalist transformer agent, to evaluating the fairness and safety of foundation models. Their philosophical interests include the  epistemology of AI, posthuman and cybernetic perspectives on embodiment and the self, and the ethical development and distribution of new  technology.

Josh Dever is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas,  Austin. Coauthor (with Herman Cappelen) of Making AI Intelligible, he is  a leading philosopher of language.

Ben Steyn is a senior R&D policy wonk at the UK Department of  Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). He has recently set up the  Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK's new R&D  funder purpose-built to unlock technological breakthroughs. Ben has also  recently finished a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in  Philosophy and Political Science. He argues that a new '3rd axis' of  political ideology, trading-off value for technology against value for  nature, explains many debates across bioethics, AI, and environmental  policy.

Julia Haas is Senior Research Scientist in the Ethics Research Team at  Google DeepMind. Previously, Julia was an Assistant Professor in the  Department of Philosophy and the Neuroscience Program at Rhodes College  and an affiliated researcher with ANU's Humanizing Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge. Julia’s research is in the philosophy of cognitive  science and neuroscience with a focus on the nature of valuation and its  role in theories of the mind. Her current work includes investigating  the possibility of meaningfully moral artificial intelligence.

David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College London.  David has written widely on epistemology, metaphysics and the  philosophy of science and mind. His books include: For Science in the  Social Sciences (1979), Theory and Meaning  (1990), Reality and  Representation (1987), Philosophical Naturalism (1992), Thinking about  Consciousness (2002), Philosophical Devices (2012), Knowing the Score  (2017), and The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience (2021).

Murray Shanahan is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London  and a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His publications  span artificial intelligence, robotics, logic,

dynamical systems,  computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. His work up to 2000  was in the tradition of classical, symbolic AI. He then turned his  attention to the brain and its embodiment. His current interests include  neurodynamics, consciousness, machine learning, and the impacts of  artificial intelligence. His book "Embodiment and the Inner Life"  (Oxford University Press, 2010) was a significant influence on the film  Ex Machina for which he was a scientific advisor.

Anandi Hattiangadi is Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University  specialising in the philosophy of mind and language with research  interests in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of cognitive  science, epistemology, metaphysics, metaethics, and cultural evolution.  Her monograph, Oughts and Thoughts: Rule Following and the Normativity  of Content responds to Kripke's (1982) argument for skepticism about  meaning and content. She has published extensively on the normativity of  meaning and content; the nature and normativity of belief; reductive  accounts of meaning and intentionality; the metaphysics of time, and  moral supervenience.

Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of philosophy at the University of  Hong Kong. His current research focus is on the philosophy of AI,  Conceptual Engineering, the conceptual foundations of political  discourse, externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, and the  interconnections between all of these.

Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor  (ZAPBOF), and co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology,  University of Antwerp. His research focuses on philosophy of mind,  philosophy of biology and aesthetics.

Iason Gabriel is Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He is a  political theorist and ethicist based focusing on the moral questions  raised by artificial intelligence. Recent work addresses the challenge  of AI value alignment, responsible innovation, and human rights.