Teaching, Supervision, and Mentorship
June 2024: Invited Lecturer, Ethics, Values, and Alignment, Natural Language Processing (Master’s level), TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands
May 2024 – June 2024: Tutor, Philosophy of Science, Engineering, and Technology (Master’s level), TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands
May 2024 – June 2024: Project Supervisor, 5 students, Crowd Computing (Master’s level), TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands
- Topic: Autonomy-preserving nudges in chatbots
April 2024 – June 2024: Bachelor Thesis Supervisor, 5 students, TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands
April 2024: Invited Speaker and Panelist, Designing for Values: Responsible Generative AI in Healthcare, Malaysian Medics International in Ireland annual student conference, Online
Dec. 2023: Invited Workshop Speaker, Ethics Deep Dive: Responsible AI and LLMs in Healthcare, Erasmus Medical Center Education Day, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Nov. 2023 – Oct. 2024: Master’s Thesis Supervisor, 2 students, TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands
Nov. 2022: Workshop Speaker and Mentor, A Smart Office for Whom?, Write Your Dystopia (PhD Workshop), LORIA, Université de Lorraine Nancy, France
June 2022: Discussion Leader, Privacy Is(n’t) Dead: Reclaiming Our Data in Today’s Online World, Mount Holyoke College European Alumnae Symposium: Building a More Just Society, the Hague, the Netherlands
Sept. 2020 – Dec. 2020: Teaching Assistant, Practical Ethics, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland
Sept. 2015 – Dec. 2015: Teaching Assistant, Organic Chemistry, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, the United States of America
Sept. 2014 – April 2015: Chemistry Tutor, General Chemistry, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, the United States of America
My Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, I am passionate about teaching the future generation about ethics, responsible research, and data privacy. The technology of the future will be crafted by them, and the design choices they make will shape the ethical impact of future research and technology. I remain heartened by the number of students, in classes and doing their theses with me, who show a genuine regard for ethics and wish to see more of it in their education. I think we are at an important point in education where the pedagogy is shifting to a more integrated form of ethics in research education - not teaching ethics as a separate lecture of course, but as an integral part of each course and the entire study program. An example that inspired me was the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard, which aimed to integrate ethics into the CS curriculum.
We further have a duty as educators to accomplish this in our own institutions - to shift our teaching from not only making sure students acquire the technical skillset to succeed, but the ability to think critically about ethics and successfully navigate the tricky choices that may come their way in their careers. This deserves as much centering and attention as, say, developing programming or machine learning skills.
In this vein, as a teacher, I tend to shy away from what I refer to as “checkbox ethics” - that is, ethics as a tick-boxing exercise that may only come up at the time a study undergoes ethical review. Instead, I view teaching ethics as 1.) teaching students how to think critically like an ethicist, and 2.) cultivating empathy.
To the first, students must have some grasp of the basic schools of ethical thought (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics) and have hands-on engagement with how each school of thought plays out in practice. I also encourage them to think about which theory or schools most resonate with them, and develop arguments for and against, in the context of real-world systems.
The second, empathy, is perhaps less traditional but can serve as a powerful means of helping students engage with the values, perspectives, and needs of the people who will eventually be using the systems they develop. As humans, we are literally hard-wired to be empathic, although it is an ability that we need to cultivate and fine-tune. Inspired by the work of social scientist Karla McLaren, I play with how teaching empathy could be used in the classroom to help students consider the people who will be affected by the design choices they will make. It’s been a pleasant exploration of how traditionally marginalized “soft” skills like empathy might help the scientists of the future develop systems responsibly. For more on this idea, please see the slides I presented on the topic at the ICT.Open Conference, Utrecht, 2024.