Our mission

Embedded Ethics is a collaboration between the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the Computer Science Department, all at Stanford. The program started in Fall 2020 with core introductory undergraduate computer science classes, then expanded to upper level computer science classes. The program embeds ethics into class lectures, homework, and assessments, with a focus on ensuring that the ethics curriculum makes meaningful contact with the technical content of courses. This makes exposure to ethics inescapable for undergraduates who take the core CS courses. It also signals to students the critical importance of recognizing and grappling with ethical issues as part of studying computer science.

Our team

The faculty leaders of the Embedded Ethics program are Mehran Sahami (Computer Science) and Rob Reich (Ethics Center, HAI, & Political Science). The program director is Anne Newman (Ethics Center). A cohort of postdoctoral fellows work in collaboration with faculty, research assistants, and course assistants to create and teach the ethics modules. The present and past Embedded Ethics postdoctoral fellows are Kathleen Creel, Diana Acosta Navas, and Benji Xie.

Computer science course assistants include: Nick Bowman, Brynne Hurst, Golrokh Emami, Skanda Vaidyanath, Lauren Gillespie, Neel Kishnani, Tim Gianitsos, Xiyu Zhang, Ha Tran, Ece Korkmaz, Golrokh Emami, Emily Wen, Daniel Guillen, and Derek McCreight.

Research assistants include Ananya Karthik, Neha Chetry, Julia Jorgensen, Grant Ray, Erin McCoy, and Sarah McCarthy. Special thanks to head TAs Nick Bowman (2020), Juliette Woodrow (2020-2022), Chase Davis (2020-2021), Zheng Lian (2021), Neel Kishnani (2021-2023), and Elyse Cornwall (2022-2023). And to the CS198 Coordinators: Kate Rydberg (2020), Erin McCoy (2020-2021), Ella Tessier-Lavigne (2020-2021), Kara Eng (2021-2022), Trip Master (2021-2022), Eunji Lee (2021-2022), Jasmine Rodriguez (2022-2023), Laura Bauman (2022-2023), and Lucía Morris (2023).

Madison Fan designed this site and Michael Chang built it.