About
Josh Simons is a final-year PhD candidate in government at Harvard University, and a former fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Centre for Ethics, where he co-led a major initiative in Political Economy and Justice, and the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society. He has worked as a Visiting Research Scientist at Facebook, helping to implement processes and frameworks for building machine learning systems responsibly; a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future of Work, where he has been a member of the Equality Task Force on AI; a US-India Technology Policy Fellow at New America; and as a policy advisor for the Labour Party in the UK Parliament.
Research
Josh is currently finishing up his dissertation which explores why and in what sense the use of statistics in decision-making is political, then considers the implications for how we govern data-driven decision-making technologies like machine learning. He focuses on two areas of law, policy and governance: equality and civil rights law, and the regulation of technology companies through anti-trust and public utility law. Josh has published widely on platform regulation, privacy and digital rights, and public understanding of technology.
Selected Publications
with Dipayan Ghosh, Utilities for Democracy: Why and How the Algorithmic Infrastructure of Facebook and Google Must be Regulated
with Talia B. Gillis, Explanation < Justification: GDPR and the Perils of Privacy
Why the UK government’s approach to coronavirus modelling is dangerous
