Mona Sloane

Mona Sloane, Ph.D., is the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program which she conceived of during her Future of Imagination Collaboratory Fellowship 2020-21. 

Mona is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She frequently publishes and speaks about AI, ethics, equitability and policy in a global context. In addition to serving a Director of *TINAD*, Mona is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, as well as a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), where she convenes the Co-Opting AI series and co-curates the The Shift series. She also is the technology editor for Public Books, and a fellow with The GovLab. 

As a researcher, Mona currently works on new methods for AI auditing, innovating AI procurement, AI in hiring and talent acquisition, AI, participation and public education, new AI tools for investigative journalism, local governance innovation on AI, and a range of different responsible AI topics. In 2020-2021, Mona has also been awarded a grant from the New America Public Interest Technology University Network to lead A BETTER TECH, a public interest technology convention and career fair that brought together students and organizations in the public interest technology space across the United States and beyond. Mona is also affiliated with the Tübingen AI Center in Germany where she leads a 3-year federally funded research project on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups.   

Recent projects Mona has led as principal investigator include the Terra Incognita NYC project, an investigation of New York City’s digital public spaces in the pandemic, as well as the AI Procurement Roundtables project, which she led together with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury (Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency & Accountability at Twitter, Founder of Parity) in collaboration with the IEEE Standards Association. In Spring 2020, Dr. Sloane worked with the Swiss Consulate New York City on the “AI Here and There” series on the social impact of AI. From 2020-2021 she was part of the inaugural cohort of the Future Imagination Collaboratory (FIC) Fellows at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In December 2020, she was added to the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame”. In 2021, she was named a NYU Faculty Honoree. 

Mona holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Cape Town. She has written for The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, OneZero Medium, and other outlets. She is a professionally trained dancer. You can follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.