People


Director

Herman Cappelen

I’m a philosopher. I currently work as a Chair Professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Before I moved to Hong Kong, I worked at the Universities of Oslo, St Andrews, and Oxford. My first job was at Vassar College.

My 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. However, my philosophical interests are broad – they cover more or less all areas of systematic philosophy.

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

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong.  My research focuses on AI safety, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Before moving to Hong Kong University, I worked at the Center for AI Safety, the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, and at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. I  received my BA from Yale, and my PhD from Rutgers, where I wrote a dissertation about dynamic semantics.

Haochen Sun (HKU Law)

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 specialises 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 Public Interest (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Rujing Stacy Huang

I am a musicologist, musician, and an Assistant Professor at HKU’s Department of Music. I examine the ethical, cultural, and socio-political implications of AI when applied to music, with a latest focus on the political economy of music AI. I also serve as a Director of the AI Song Contest, a foundation that runs an annual international competition exploring the possibilities of human-AI partnership in songwriting. The contest made the front page of The New York Times (2021) and has received coverage from Scientific AmericanScienceMIT Technology ReviewBillboardMusic Business Worldwide, BBC, etc.

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

Post-doctoral Fellow

Frank Hong

I am 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. I was recently awarded my PhD from the University of Southern California (USC). My areas of specialization include the philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of AI.

Research Affiliate

Jean Gové

I am currently a Research Affiliate at the AI & Humanity Lab at the University of Hong Kong, having recently obtained a PhD in philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

My research is primarily focused on issues relating to philosophy of mind and language as they relate to AI. Furthermore, I am also interested in exploring certain ethical aspects of AI tools, such as manipulation, and their societal impacts.

External Affiliates

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.

Center for AI Safety

The Center for AI Safety(CAIS — pronounced ‘case’) is a San Francisco-based research and field-building nonprofit. They believe that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to profoundly benefit the world, provided that they can develop and use it safely. However, in contrast to the dramatic progress in AI, many basic problems in AI safety have yet to be solved. Their mission is to reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI by conducting safety research, building the field of AI safety researchers, and advocating for safety standards.

Administrative Staff

Erica Lam

email: ericalss@hku.hk
telephone: (852) 3917 7272 
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