Ajay is an economist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He conducts research on the economics of artificial intelligence, science and technology policy, and the geography of innovation. He has published over a hundred scholarly articles. He is the co-author of two best-selling books on the economics of artificial intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power & Prediction, both published by Harvard Business Review Press. He is co-editor of two scholarly books, The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda and Economics of AI: Healthcare Challenges, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Ajay is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an academic advisory council member at the Center on Regulation and markets at Brookings in Washington, DC; an advisory board member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society in Pittsburgh; and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. Ajay is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a not-for-profit program with a mission to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. Graduates of the CDL have created over $30B in equity value. Ajay is a co-founder of Sanctuary that has a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots. In 2022, Ajay was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor.
Professor Angela Aristidou speaks, writes, and consults about the implementation of digital and artificial intelligence tools in the healthcare ecosystem. Angela is a DEL Fellow (Faculty Affiliate) at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, in the Human-centred AI Centre, and specializes in strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management. She is an international award-winning academic (among other: Fulbright; Stanford University’s CASBS), she is single grant-holder for a UK Research Innovation Future Leader Fellowship (approx. £1.7 UK million pounds; 2020-2028) and she currently leads a team of researchers examining digital care innovations in the UK, USA, China, and Canada with plans to expand her studies to more countries.
Angela’s ongoing research program (“Innovating Across Sectors”) examines how different sectors (public, private, third) come together around digital health technologies such as artificial intelligence. Her research adopts an ecosystem approach, including the viewpoints of (and real-world data from) hospitals, healthcare professionals and managers, professional medical associations, technology and pharma companies, patient- and patient advocacy networks, nonprofit and community associations, and healthcare-related unions. She focuses on how these multiple stakeholders manage or regulate the deployment of the new digital technologies in (national) healthcare systems and health services.
Angela studies what she refers to as “AI in the wild”—how AI tools are used in the hands of frontline workers in real-world settings. Her research team includes experts in management, economics, sociology, psychology, data science, and medical sub-specialties, and leverages a range of qualitative and quantitative methods. Current research projects include:
Angela is included in USA and UK national committees and expert panels on the development of AI regulation (for Open source AI, for LLMs, for GenAI, for AI implementation), she has a track record of public speaking in academic and industry events, and she consults and advises established pharmaceutical companies as well as startups on digital transformation and AI strategy.
Angela has worked for NASA’s Biomedical Research Institute, she has been chair of the Research Advisory Board of the international Relational Coordination Research Collaborative (2020-2022), associate editor to international conferences on technology and business (AOM OCT; ICIS), and a guest AE to the top-tier journal Management Information Systems Quarterly. She is an alumna of Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
David Autor is Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, vice president of the American Economic Association, co-director of the NBER Labor Studies Program and the JPAL Work of the Future experimental initiative. His scholarship explores the labor market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.
Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship. In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.”
In a 2019 article, the Economist labeled him as “The academic voice of the American worker.” Later that same year, and with (at least) equal justification, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist” by John Oliver of Last Week Tonight in a segment on automation and employment.
Sarah’s research uses novel methods to measure skills, tasks, and technologies, with an emphasis on uncovering fine distinctions using big datasets.
Her most recent work uses state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to better characterize how jobs have changed over time.
Sarah has been published by the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and the Sloan Management Review, and has spoken at several events, including the California State Assembly’s Rising Tide Summit on Economic Security. In 2019, she was awarded an honorable mention by the Upjohn Institute for her dissertation, “Three Essays on Vulnerable Workers.”
Sarah received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
She is especially interested in questions related to market structure, firm strategies, and consumer behavior in digital markets. Her research combines economic modeling and data analytics to understand the online economy.
Sagit earned her PhD and MA in economics, and BSc in mathematics from Tel Aviv University. She joined the Coller School of Management in October 2017 as an assistant professor of Technology Management and Information Systems.
Sagit also conducts postdoctoral research at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, where she remains a digital fellow.
Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use across the broader world of work. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the Ted stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup. Beane is an assistant professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a digital fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Institute for the Digital Economy.
Seth is an assistant professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics. Before coming to Chapman University, Seth was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Seth received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston University in 2016. His dissertation advisor was Laurence Kotlikoff. He received a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Tulane University in 2012.
Seth’s current projects with other Stanford Digital Economy Lab researchers focus on measuring skill biased technical change, taxation, and regulation of digital platforms, as well as the measurement of network effects and the macroeconomic implications of progress in artificial intelligence.
Seth has presented his research at the US Capitol and as an expert for a US international public diplomacy mission. His work has been published in AEJ: Applied Economics, PNAS, Sloan Management Review and other peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed outlets.
He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
Avinash holds a PhD in management science from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His research builds broadly on advances in the fields of labor economics, sociology, computational social science, network science, data science, political science, and complex systems.
Morgan is assistant professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems and the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh.
He is also an MIT Connection Science Fellow and digital fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Morgan also serves as researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Genomic Medicine and a research affiliate at the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security at the University of Pittsburgh.
Renée is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications for cognitive bias in human decision-making. She is a leading thinker on the science of digital brand strategy and her research and expertise have been published in various academic and trade publications.
Renée’s research examines how social structure and technology (e.g., Digital Customer Experience, Status, Social Media) affect performance and self-perception (as featured in her TEDx talk, “The Outsourced Mind”). Her projects have examined how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine real from fake products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion.
Renée is a 2020 honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe,” and has been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants.