Felicia Jing

Felicia Jing is a political theorist and Research Scientist in the Human-Centered Trustworthy AI group at IBM Research. Her research examines the enduring political, economic, and social structures that have shaped the development of automation and computing technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. By tracing the way that historical formations continue to inform our present, her work seeks to better understand and anticipate the social impact of emerging AI systems, while charting the challenges and possibilities of responsible technology design in the future.

Currently, Felicia is the Co-PI of a collaborative grant on the Ethics of LLMs at the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Center where she works with media theorists and historians of science to situate computer-generated synthetic data practices in a longer history of speculative media and modern property regimes. Previously, she led a research initiative on the labor dynamics of participatory AI development, which was recognized in 2023 as among the most impactful research in responsible AI by the Responsible AI Institute. Her broader work on AI ethics, multidisciplinary algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs), and context aware AI safety has been published at venues such as the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing and the ACM Journal of Responsible Innovation. Finally, her writing as a political theorist has appeared in Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, is forthcoming at Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, and is under preparation for special issues of Social Text and Big Data & Society.

Felicia is an ABD PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University where she also holds an M.A. in Political Science. Previously, she received a B.A. in Philosophy from Reed College.