About

The Sloane Lab is an interdisciplinary research group led by sociologist Mona Sloane. It conducts empirical research on the implications of technology for the organization of social life. The focus lies on artificial intelligence (AI) as a social phenomenon that intersects with wider cultural, economic, material, and political conditions. The lab spearheads social science leadership in applied work on responsible AI, public scholarship, and technology policy.

Contact

Email: monasloanelab [at] gmail [dot] com

Call for a Postdoc for the AI x HR research

The Sloane Lab is seeking a postdoc to conduct qualitative research on AI and HR management! More information here.

Current Research

Ethics and AI Start-Ups

The role of culture in ethics and AI is under-explored, especially in the context of start-ups. We are researching how AI start-ups in Europe’s largest economy – Germany – conceive of and operationalize ethics, as well as what the cultural and historical roots of their actions are, and how they impact their professional practice.

AI and Recruitment

What AI systems are on the recruitment market and how do recruiters use and make sense of AI systems? How do they interpret AI outputs and use these interpretations as a basis for making decisions about job candidates? How do recruiting AI vendors design for the recruiting workflow? What assumptions flow into recruiting AI design? We are conducting empirical research on the types, design, uses, and interpretations of AI used in recruitment.

Auditing AI

Increasingly, regulators mandate audits of AI systems to mitigate the potential for AI harm. We are building cutting-edge interdisciplinary frameworks for impactful and meaningful AI audits and conduct AI audits in the field. Examples include an audit on personality AI-driven assessment tools used in recruiting. Newly funded work focuses on motion capture and volumetric technology to extend AI audit frameworks to include hardware and other instruments used to collect data used in AI and other data-driven algorithmic applications.

AI Transparency

With this work, we are addressing the lack of scalable techniques for establishing meaningful transparency of AI systems. We are building out the concept of contextual transparency as an applied approach that integrates social science, engineering, and information design to help improve AI transparency for specific professions, business processes, and stakeholder groups.

Gumshoe_x: Investigative Journalism x Social Science

Techniques used by investigative journalists are increasingly relevant for understanding AI’s social impact. Through the Gumshoe_x program, a collaboration with journalist Hilke Schellmann, we are advancing projects that hold the powerful accountable and that leverage science, journalism, and AI innovation for the public interest. This work includes a natural language processing (NLP) tool called Gumshoe that helps journalists to quickly understand large FOIA datasets, now integrated into MuckRock, and work on AI-driven speech-to-text transcriptions.

Global AI Policy 

The landscape of AI regulations, governance measures, and policies is rapidly expanding, as are government-led funding initiatives which affect the politics of knowledge production on AI. With this work, we are building out the concept of AI Localism, are analyzing the global landscape of national AI strategies, and are producing a systematic review of the governance mandates contained in transnational, national, federal, and local regulations of AI. We are also developing new frameworks and tools for effective AI compliance.

Public Scholarship

Sloane Lab is dedicated to the advancement of public scholarship. Dr. Sloane regularly works with practitioners, policymakers, and colleagues from different fields to advance critical thinking and innovation in the technology space. Public scholarship projects include the Co-Opting AI series at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge, the editorship of the Technology Section of Public Books, the A Better Tech project on public interest technology careers, or the *This Is Not A Drill* program on art, technology, equity, and the climate emergency.

Team

Mona Sloane

Mack Brumbaugh

Emilia Ruzicka

Ploy Pruekcharoen

Ella Duus

Katelyn Mei

Hauke Sandhaus

Emma Harvey

Collaborators

David Danks

Ekkehard Ernst

Abigail Jacobs

Allison Koenecke

Emanuel Moss

Hilke Schellmann

Matt Statler

Theresa Veer

Stefaan Verhulst

Elena Wüllhorst

Alumni

Alina Constantin

Adio Tichafara Dinika

Tanvi Sharma

Janina Zakrzewski