People
Director
Herman Cappelen
Herman Cappelen is the author and co-author of eleven influential monographs on a broad range of topics in philosophy. As a Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, he is the founder and Director of both the AI & Humanity Lab and the MA program in AI, Ethics and Society. Through this work, he is cultivating a new, philosophy-forward approach to the challenges of AI, focused on establishing the philosophical foundations for its understanding.
His research includes co-authoring, with Josh Dever, the first monograph on LLMs and metasemantics, Making AI Intelligible (OUP 2021), and the forthcoming book Going Whole Hog: In Defence of AI Cognition. His papers also explore critical issues such as AI risk, AI introspection and self-knowledge, and externalist perspectives on AI.
Professor Cappelen’s role in shaping the field extends to major editorial projects. He is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series on AI and Philosophy, which will publish 40 volumes on the topic, and is the co-editor, with Rachel Sterken, of the forthcoming Communicating with AI (OUP).
Before joining the University of Hong Kong, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, a Chair Professor at the University of St Andrews, and a Professor at the University of Oslo.
Since 2008, he has been an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also an elected member of the Academia Europaea (since 2018) and a permanent member of the Institut International de Philosophie.
Principal Investigators
Rachel Sterken
I am Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, and co-director of ConceptLab Hong Kong.
My research centers on philosophy of language and connects to a broad range of issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, social philosophy and developmental psychology.
Nate Sharadin
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The College of New Jersey. Before that, I was the Sutton Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University, and before that I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. I received my Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill, under the supervision of Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and Simon Blackburn.
Boris Babic
I work primarily in ethics, law, and policy of artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially in medical applications. I also work in Bayesian statistics and epistemology. Formerly, I was an Assistant Professor at INSEAD, both in France and Singapore, and a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). I 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.
Simon Goldstein
Brian Wong
Visiting Professor
Seth Lazar
Seth Lazar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, a fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a member of the Executive Committee of the ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference. He has worked and published widely on the ethics of war, risk, and AI, and now leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, where he leads research projects in normative philosophy of computing, funded by the Australian Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Insurance Australia Group, Schmidt Sciences, Google and OpenAI. His book, *Connected by Code: How AI Structures, and Governs, the Ways We Relate*, based on his 2023 Tanner Lecture on AI and Human Values, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His recent work can be found at linktr.ee/sethlazar.
Seth Lazar visited the AIH Lab at The University of Hong Kong from 1 December 2024 to 25 February 2025.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Kaitlyn Vredenburgh
Kaitlyn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. I work in the philosophy of social science, political philosophy, and the philosophy of technology.
From 2024-2028, she has been undertaking a UKRI funded Future Leaders Fellowship to investigate AI, worker autonomy, and the future of work.
Kaitlyn Vredenburgh visited the AIH Lab at The University Hong Kong from 18 January 2025 to 31 March 2025.
Research Affiliate
Alice Wong
I am an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, with a PhD in Computational Data Science from Chapman University. My prior research focused on the neuroscience of the sense of agency and the human (in)ability to behave randomly. I am currently interested in exploring the intersection of the philosophy of AI, mechanistic interpretability, and neuroscience.
David Villena
I teach in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong and have published on topics in applied ethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, social and political philosophy, and their intersections.
Before, I taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Lingnan University, where I received a PhD, and were 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). I 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.
Kangyu Wang
I am an Assistant Lecturer at HKU Philosophy Department, and a Research Affiliate at HKU’s AI & Humanity Lab. I work on the BA & BEng in AI and Data Science programme. Prior to this, I was at the LSE for my PhD. I am also a non-stipendiary Research Affiliate at ANU’s Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab.
I’m currently working on agency, AI decision-making with incommensurability, mechanistic interpretability, AI decision-making under uncertainty, LLM-empowered ABM, and AI for Finance. I also work more generally on practical reason, decision theory, and the philosophy of economics and finance.
Lee Elkin
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. My research interests are in AI, decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of cognitive science.
I previously worked at The Alan Turing Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Jagiellonian University, and the University of Paris-East Créteil.
Sean Donahue
I’m interested in topics that combine political philosophy with AI and digital technologies, such as the political legitimacy of online platforms and the permissibility of AI-led governments.
I joined the University of Hong Kong as an assistant lecturer after working as a postdoctoral fellow with the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab at the Australian National University. I have a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Southern California.
Zacharus Gudmunsen
I am currently an assistant lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. Following my PhD, titled ‘Artificial Moral Agency: Autonomy and Evolution’, at the University of Leeds (2024), I taught philosophy and ethics at Koc University in Istanbul.
My main research focus is the distinctive contribution that non-human agents can make to our understanding of the world. I have consequent research interests in metaethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, moral psychology and cognitive science, and applied ethics.
Jean Gové
External Collaborators
London AI and Humanity Project
The Project brings together interdisciplinary researchers from academia and industry to investigate human interaction with AI. They are based at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, School of Advanced Study.
Administrative Staff
