Danks Wins 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship To Explore Trust, Autonomous Technologies

Carnegie Corporation of New York has named Carnegie Mellon University's David Danks a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Each of the 35 new fellows will receive $200,000, for a total of $7 million in funding, making it the most generous stipend for humanities and social sciences research available. David Danks Danks, the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy and Psychology and head of the Department of Philosophy , will use the fellowship to explore human trust in the age of autonomous technologies. Other winning proposals address issues such as inequity in U.S. education, radicalization via social media, voting and election processes, the global increase in violence against women in politics and the legal limbo facing immigrants. "The health of our democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and our universities, academies and academic associations play an essential role in replenishing critical information and providing knowledge through scholarship,” said Vartan Gregorian , president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. "The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is designed to support scholarship that brings fresh perspectives from the social sciences and humanities to the social, political, and economic problems facing the United States and the world today. Well known for using computational cognitive science to develop computational models to describe, predict and, most importantly, explain human behavior, Danks is a leading expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence.