蜜桃视频

蜜桃视频 has selected three graduate students for the 2026-27 K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship. The fellowship provides support for doctoral researchers examining the ethical and societal dimensions of computational technologies while encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship focused on fairness, accountability and community empowerment. The three fellows are conducting innovative research that reflects the program鈥檚 commitment to examining the complex relationship between people and technology, ethical considerations in computational science and the broader effects of emerging technologies on society.

鈥淓very year it is such a privilege to help select the K&L Gates Initiative Presidential Fellows,鈥� said Alex John London, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies in the Department of Philosophy at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies. 鈥淚t is humbling to see so many excellent applications and daunting to have to only make three awards. It is also rewarding to see so much work aimed at addressing pressing social issues raised by the rapid acceleration of AI development and deployment. This year鈥檚 awardees work on issues related to privacy, to ensuring that AI systems benefit people and are aligned with human values and to understanding the ways in which AI is altering hierarchies, the division of labor and access to opportunity within firms. At a time when public opinion about AI seems to be shifting, it is more important than ever to ensure that Carnegie Mellon is leading research that empowers humanity and recognizes the centrality of ethics to responsible innovation.鈥�

Meet the fellows:

Parand Akbari, Tepper School of Business

Akbari is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at 蜜桃视频's Tepper School of Business, and her advisor is . Her research studies how artificial intelligence is adopted by firms and how that adoption reshapes work, wages, organizational hierarchy and the distribution of economic opportunity. Her dissertation, 鈥淭he Economics of AI Adoption,鈥� combines corporate disclosure transcripts, including earnings calls and investor conferences, worker-level labor data, financial-market evidence and causal inference to study what happens after firms move from talking about AI to actually deploying it.

A central part of her work builds auditable large-language-model pipelines that identify realized AI adoption from these transcripts. This allows her to study not only which jobs may be exposed to AI, but how firms reorganize once AI is introduced, which workers are most affected and whether the gains from AI are broadly shared. Her broader agenda connects economics, computational measurement, labor and organizational economics and finance to produce evidence that can inform more accountable governance of AI in firms and labor markets.

鈥淩eceiving the K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship is a real honor because it supports the question that has been driving my dissertation: what happens to workers when AI moves from possibility to practice?鈥� Akbari said. 鈥淎 lot of the discussion around AI and work is still about what AI might do. My research starts from where firms are already adopting AI and studies how those decisions change wages, hierarchy, supervision and career opportunities inside organizations. With the support of this fellowship, I hope to push this project further by strengthening the evidence on realized AI adoption and developing a clearer account of who benefits from AI-driven reorganization and who bears its costs. I am grateful to be part of an initiative that takes these questions seriously and encourages research on computational technologies not only as technical tools, but as forces that shape economic opportunity and worker welfare.鈥�

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the at 蜜桃视频, advised by and . His research seeks to answer the key question: How does AI change privacy, and what should we do about it? To that end, he develops tools that assist AI practitioners in identifying, reasoning about and mitigating privacy risks during the development of consumer AI products. His work has been published in leading privacy and security, AI governance and human-computer interaction venues, including USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, AIES, CHI, TOCHI, and IJHCS. He has earned a Best Paper Award (CHI 2024), a Distinguished Paper Award (USENIX Security 2024) and an honorable mention (CHI 2026). His research has been covered by the media outlets, including the BBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, TechCrunch and 404 Media. In addition to the K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship, he is a CyLab Presidential Fellow.

鈥淚'm excited to pursue my vision for privacy-respecting AI as a K&L Gates Presidential Fellow,鈥� Lee said 鈥淧rivacy failures in AI products accumulate from product decisions made early, under deadline, by teams that have no shared vocabulary for the risks they are introducing and no assessment tools built for how they actually work. With the support of the fellowship, I can keep building the infrastructure that makes those risks visible and deploy it with the teams making those decisions. My goal is for privacy-respecting AI to become the default in how products are built and governed.鈥�

Naveen Raman, School of Computer Science

Raman is a Ph.D. student in the at 蜜桃视频. He is advised by . His research focuses on incorporating human preferences and judgment into the design of high-stakes AI systems. His research combines theoretical tools from optimization and algorithmic game theory with real-world collaborations with practitioners to develop AI tools. Raman was previously named to the , and he has deployed his research to domains including food sustainability and behavioral mental health. Previously, he obtained a and a bachelor鈥檚 degree from the University of Maryland. He has received awards including the Churchill Scholarship and been named a finalist for the CRA Undergraduate Researcher of the Year.

鈥淚 am very thankful to receive the K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship and am grateful for my advisor, collaborators and mentors for all their help throughout the journey,鈥� Raman said. 鈥淭he fellowship will help support my research developing AI tools in high-stakes domains, while incorporating the preferences and opinions of practitioners and partners in these domains. Receiving the fellowship reinforces the idea that understanding how AI is used and deployed in real-world applications is a key challenge. I look forward to working on these topics and sharing my research with both the K&L Gates Committee and the broader research community.鈥�