People
Herman Cappelen
Centre director
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.
Rachel Sterken
Research director
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.
Max Deutsch
Research director
Max Deutsch works on metaphilosophy, the philosophies of language and mind, and epistemology. His book The Myth Of The Intuitive (MIT Press), was published in 2015, and he has published many papers spanning his research interests.
Nate Sharadin
Principal investigator
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.
Frank Hong
Principal investigator
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.
Boris Babic
Principal investigator
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.
Justin Tiwald
Principal investigator
Justin Tiwald is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He is a philosopher who works at the intersections of ethics, political philosophy, and traditional Chinese philosophy, with particular interests in Chinese and Western notions of empathy, virtue, well-being, and rights.
Amit Chaturvedi
Principal investigator
I’m a philosopher working on problems related to perceptual concepts, content, and consciousness. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. I’m especially interested in the contributions of Indian philosophical traditions to contemporary debates concerning non-conceptual perception and reflexive self-awareness. My research examines the roles of concepts, attention, and memory in structuring the contents of conscious perceptual experience, as well as how these roles were understood by Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers.
Rujing Stacy Huang
Principal investigator
I am a musicologist, musician, and currently Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow 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 American, Science, MIT Technology Review, Billboard, Music Business Worldwide, BBC, etc.
Josh Dever (Texas)
Affiliate
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.
Janet Hsiao (HKU Psychology)
Affiliate
Dr. Janet Hsiao is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) and worked with Prof. Gary Cottrell. She received the Ph.D. degree in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2006, the M.Sc. degree in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University in 2002, and the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from National Taiwan University in 1999.
Jessica Pepp (Uppsala)
Affiliate
Jessica Pepp’s research interests are in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on the nature of reference in language and thought. From January 2019 she holds a Burman fellowship at Uppsala University. She is PI of the VR-funded project New Frontiers of Speech: Philosophy of Language in the Information Age (2020-2022). She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) in 2012 and docentship from University of Turku (Finland) in 2015.Eliot Michaelson (KCL)
Affiliate
Eliot is a Reader in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London, an Honorary Associate Professor of Linguistics at University College London, and the Treasurer of the Mind Association. Most of his work centers on the philosophy of language, and in particular on non-ideal approaches to phenomena like meaning and communication.
Haochen Sun (HKU Law)
Professor
Professor 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).
Find more information about his work here.