Helen Nissenbaum

Helen Nissenbaum is director of the Digital Life Initiative and Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech. Her books include Obfuscation: A User's Guide to Privacy and Protest (with Finn Brunton), Values at Play in Digital Games (with Mary Flanagan), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, where she lays out the theory of contextual integrity. Her research spans topics of privacy, security, accountability, bias, data concentration, and values in design as manifest in digital technologies. Beyond academic publication, Nissenbaum works on free software tools, Adnauseam and TrackMeNot, defending privacy, autonomy, and freedom online. She holds a BA (Hons) in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.

Webb Keane

Webb Keane grew up in New York City and studied studio art and philosophy. After working as a ranch hand, waiter, file clerk, and cafe manager, he ended up in Peru as an archaeological draftsman. Having discovered cultural and linguistic anthropology along the way, he went on to receive the PhD from the University of Chicago, after which he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, before moving to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His most extensive fieldwork has been on the island of Sumba, in eastern Indonesia. His wide-ranging interests have also taken him to the debates about language politics in Jakarta, discussions of evidence for Neolithic religion in Turkey, and the Dutch colonial archives.
Professor Keane has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, the University of Oslo, and National Taitung University (Taiwan), and has taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. 

Tsjalling Swierstra

Tsjalling Swierstra's field of interest is the ethics and the politics of new and emerging science and technology (NEST). He has published on moral controversies regarding cloning, new reproductive technologies, genomics, food technologies, nanotechnology, synthetic and system biology, artificial gametes, neuroscience, and converging technologies. The philosophical problematic driving his research is: how to analyse, evaluate, and anticipate the mutual shaping of science and technology, and ethics and politics? And how to make this anticipatory knowledge regarding ‘technomoral change’ available to technologists, policy makers, and the larger public? As part of this endeavour he has authored reports and developed ‘technomoral’ scenarios for several public engagement events regarding genomics, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology. In addition to this work in the philosophy of technology, Swierstra also regularly publishes articles on social and political issues such as the drawbacks of the widely held ideal of individual choice, the causes of societal polarisation, or the costs of meritocracy.