Anne L. Washington

Scholarship on technology governance often emphasizes conventional implementations overlooking alternative narratives. Anne L. Washington will spend her time at CASBS writing about the role of blockchain as a digital ledger within communities underserved by a trusted authority. Blockchain democratized administrative record-keeping, making it possible for any group of people to become their own archival institution. While grounded in the specifics of building digital cryptographic transactions, this project explores why communities embrace open systems they can control.

Washington is a computer scientist who specializes in data policy. Drawing on theories from management information systems and organizational sociology, her work asks how digital innovation transforms social norms in business and public life. She is an assistant professor of data policy at New York University and serves as the director of the Digital Interests Lab which was initially funded from her NSF CAREER grant on open data governance. She has testified before Congress and with several international, national, and regional governments on technology policy. She has published widely in journals and ACM conferences, and is the author of Ethical Data Science: Prediction in the Public Interest (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her research is at the forefront of the burgeoning scholarship on public interest technology and joins others developing interpretive approaches to data science.  

For more information, please visit: http://annewashington.com