Hamid Ekbia

Ekbia is currently a university professor at Syracuse University and director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the founding director of the Academic Alliance for AI Policy – a group of scholars and journalists who provide nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research, insights, and strategic analysis to inform and advise policymakers, media, and the public on issues of artificial intelligence governance. In his director roles, he advocates for responsible AI regulatory policy.

Before joining Syracuse in 2022, Ekbia was a professor of informatics, cognitive science, and international studies with the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. He was also the founding director of the Center for Research on Mediated Interaction. Before that, Ekbia spent a year as a visiting lecturer at the Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and then an assistant professor at the University of Redlands.

Political economy of computing

Ekbia has introduced and is developing a new area of study, which he refers to as the "political economy of computing". He approaches it as a dynamic relationship between computing and the capitalist economy. He envisions the study of the interactions between computing and the economy as a recursive process that would start at the macro scale of the social and historical (world-economies, nation-states, law, trade, infrastructures, crisis, etc.), move to the meso level of the institutional and organizational (firms, markets, platforms, innovation, jobs, automation, etc.) and finally zoom in on the micro level of the personal and psychological (affect, attention, labor, value, privacy, etc.).