Annette Zimmermann is a political philosopher working on the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data.

 


Annette is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (starting August 2022) and a Technology & Human Rights Fellow at Harvard University. Before that, Annette was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of York and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Annette Zimmermann-2021-2.jpg

The Algorithmic is Political.

AI does not exist in a moral and political vacuum. Technological models interact dynamically with the social world, including larger-scale patterns of injustice.

How we deal with this problem is a moral and a political choice.

Annette’s research explores questions like: what is algorithmic injustice, and how do its effects compound over time? What role do risk and uncertainty play in this context? What does it mean to trust AI? Whose voices should we prioritize in collective decisions about AI design and deployment—and whose voices are currently excluded? Whose rights are most at risk? How can we place AI under meaningful democratic control—and would that solve the problem of algorithmic injustice?

University of Wisconsin-Madison

starting August 2022

Annette is an incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Beyond the ethics and politics of AI, Annette’s research interests include contemporary political philosophy, moral philosophy (especially the ethics of risk and uncertainty), the philosophy of law (punishment and the philosophy of criminal law, as well as constitutional law and discrimination law), and the philosophy of science (models, explanation, abstraction).

 

During 2020-21 and 2021-22, Annette is a Technology & Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, at Harvard University.

During the fellowship at Harvard, Annette will be conducting research for her book manuscript “The Algorithmic is Political”.

Harvard University

2020 - 2023

 

From 2020 to 2022, Annette was a permanent Lecturer (US equivalent: Assistant Professor) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of York.

University of York

2020-2022

 

Princeton University

2018 – 2020

At Princeton University, Annette was affiliated with the Center for Human Values as well as the Center for Information Technology Policy, conducting research on the political and moral philosophy of AI, and designing a course on AI ethics for an interdisciplinary group of PhD students from humanities, social science, and computer science backgrounds.

While conducting postdoctoral research at Princeton, Annette was invited to spent time as a visiting researcher at the Australian National University (2019) and at Stanford University (2020).

 

University of Oxford

2012 – 2018

Annette holds a DPhil (PhD) and MPhil from the University of Oxford. Annette’s graduate research was focused on topics in contemporary analytic political and moral philosophy—in particular, democratic decision-making, justice, and risk. While a DPhil student at Nuffield College, Annette spent some time as a Visiting PhD student and Teaching Fellow at Yale University (2016).

 

Awards etc.

Annette has received the American Philosophical Association’s 2021 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Award for her work on algorithmic injustice in higher education. Annette was also featured on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list of 2021. In 2020, Annette won the Hastings Center’s 2020 David Roscoe Award for an Early-Career Essay on Science, Ethics, and Society, and Quartz named Annette as one of 18 AI bias experts to follow.

Annette’s recent academic work has been published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Philosophy & Public Affairs, and her essays and political commentary have appeared in the New Statesman and in the Boston Review.

Annette is currently a Co-Investigator on a £703,000 research grant for a multidisciplinary research project on Assuring Responsibility for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems. Annette’s research has been generously supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as well as by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the University of Oxford, and the German National Academic Foundation.