Alison Powell is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She directs the JUST AI Network: Joining Up Society and Technology for AI, which is supported by the AHRC and in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute. Her research examines how people’s values influence the way technology is built, and how ethics in practice unfolds in technology design contexts.

Alison’s work on open source projects, open hardware products and community-based innovation has spanned the past fifteen years and her book Undoing Optimization: Civic Action and Smart Cities will be published in January 2021 by Yale University Press.

Her previous projects include the Horizon 2020-funded VIRT-EU, which examined ways to develop ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities and responsible innovation, and Understanding Automated Decisions, which considered the possibility and consequences of explaining how algorithms work.