Newsletter Archive_Spring/Summer 2025

University of Washington

SPRING/SUMMER 2025

Celebrating 10 years of impact

The Lab recently marked its 10th anniversary with a gathering of alumni and faculty, honoring our foundation and also what's to come. Read more about the event and view our 10-Year Report here.

Distinguished Lecturer engages deeply across communities

Dr. Alondra Nelson attracted 350 people to her lecture and met in small groups with students and faculty. Read more about the event here.

Alondra Nelson meets with students around a large table at the Tech Policy Lab office.

Engaging with international experts

The Lab welcomed visiting scholars and students from around the globe, including Italy, the UK and Asia. Learn about the visitors here.

Discussion session highlights importance of accessibility

University of Maryland professor Jonathan Lazar shared his passion for accessibility in tech with attendees to a recent campus meeting. Read more about Lazar's visit here.

New Cutting-Edge Research

"Robot Law: Volume II"; Co-Director Ryan Calo.
"Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval"; Co-Director Aylin Caliskan.
"Intrinsic Bias is Predicted by Pretraining Data and Correlates with Downstream Performance in Vision-Language Encoders"; Co-Director Aylin Caliskan.
"We’re utterly ill-prepared to deal with something like this": Teachers’ Perspectives on Student Generation of Synthetic Nonconsensual Explicit Imagery"; Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno, Faculty Associate Franziska Roesner and alumnus Miranda Wei.
"You Have to Ignore the Dangers": User Perceptions of the Security and Privacy Benefits of WhatsApp Mods"; Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno, Faculty Associate Franziska Roesner and alumnus Kentrell Owens.
"To Reveal or Conceal: Privacy and Marginalization in Avatars"; Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno and Faculty Associate Franziska Roesner.
"Analyzing the AI Nudification Application Ecosystem"; Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno.

TPL in the Media

Co-Director Aylin Caliskan and Faculty Associate Emily Bender,
“Recognizing the (un)hidden figures in AI.”

Student intern

Vannary Sou,
‘Cruel optimism’: Mass layoffs take the shine off careers in the tech sector, UW research finds.

Faculty Associate Emily Bender,
"The Great Language Flattening."

Co-Director Aylin Caliskan and PhD student Kyra Wilson,
"Gender, race, and intersectional bias in AI resume screening via language model retrieval."

2025 Graduates

Kaiming Cheng, PhD; Computer Science & Engineering;

research scientist at Meta, working on PyTorch and on-device AI.

Kentrell Owens, PhD; Computer Science & Engineering;

postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.

Miranda Wei, PhD; Computer Science & Engineering;

postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University.

Miki Kusunose (Winter ’25), Economics;

research associate at NERA in the healthcare antitrust practice in San Francisco.

Nathan Lee, Information;

software engineer at Mentra in San Francisco.

Sean Lim, Geography;

UX design analyst at Deloitte Digital in New York.

TPL Co-Director talks research

and new publication

Ryan Calo discusses his research on law and emerging technologies, as well as his new book, "Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach." Read the full story here.

Tech Policy Lab, William Gates Hall, Room 222