The Workshop on Legal and Ethical Governance Challenges Faced by Big Models

Cong Cai (opens in new tab), OPO Disability Group

Cong Cai is a public speaker, trainer, researcher, and community leader. He is China’s first visually impaired person to pursue a doctoral degree at the China Academy of Social Sciences, specializing in Communications. Board member of Shanghai Youren Foundation; Partner of One Plus One Disability Group, China’s largest disabled persons’ organization; and Council Member of China Disability Research Society.

Since 2010, as a researcher of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, Cai led the editing of a series of disability case studies called “Canku” (残库), covering issues of disability and gender, disability and employment, and disability and people. He also developed a range of handbooks for corporations, parents, and the disability community, to guide their efforts on advocacy, awareness raising, and accessibility.

Fengming Cui (opens in new tab), Harvard University

Dr. Cui Fengming is the Director of China Program at Harvard Law School Project on Disability. She holds an Ed.M. in higher education from Nanjing University in China and Ed.D. in special education from Boston University in the United States. Her main scholarly interests, teaching, publications, and public interest work focus on issues of Chinese disability studies, disability laws and policies in China; disability inclusive education, employment, and community; equal Participation of persons with disabilities and their representative organizations; Parent organization and family system support.

Vivian Ding (opens in new tab), Microsoft

Vivian Ding is the legal advisor of Microsoft Research Asia. Vivian practices in a variety of law areas, including intellectual property, data license and transaction, privacy and data protection, technology export, etc. 

Lixin Fan (opens in new tab), WeBank

Dr. Lixin Fan is the Chief Scientist of Artificial Intelligence at WeBank. He has published more than 70 international journal and conference articles in vareity of research areas include machine learning and deep learning, privacy computing and federated learning, computer vision and pattern recognition etc..  Dr. Fan has participated in NIPS/NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCAI and other top artificial intelligence conferences for a long time, served as the area chairs and hosted seminars in various technical fields.  He is also the inventor of more than a hundred patents filed in the United States, Europe and China.

Rui Guo (opens in new tab), Renmin University of China

Dr. Guo Rui is an Associate Professor at the Law School of Renmin University of China. He received an S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, and he is a fellow of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. Dr. Rui Guo’s book “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence” has been well received by the academic community and the public. He serves as a member of the Sub-Committee of Artificial Intelligence and Sub-Committee of User Interface, National Standardization Committee of Information Technology.

Xia (Ben) Hu (opens in new tab), Rice University

Dr. Xia “Ben” Hu is an Associate Professor at Rice University in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Center for Transforming Data to Knowledge (D2K Lab). Dr. Hu has published over 100 papers in several major academic venues, including NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, etc. An open-source package developed by his group, namely AutoKeras, has become the most used automated deep learning system on Github (with over 8,000 stars and 1,000 forks). Also, his work on deep collaborative filtering, anomaly detection and knowledge graphs have been included in the TensorFlow package, Apple production system and Bing production system, respectively. His papers have received several Best Paper (Candidate) awards from venues such as ICML, WWW, WSDM, ICDM, AMIA and INFORMS. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award and ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award. His work has been cited more than 18,000 times with an h-index of 51. He is the conference General Co-Chair for WSDM 2020 and ICHI 2023. He is also the founder of AI POW LLC.

Yan Luo (opens in new tab), Covington & Burling LLP

Yan Luo is a partner at Covington & Burling. She advises clients on a broad range of regulatory matters in connection with data privacy and cybersecurity, antitrust and competition, as well as international trade laws in the United States, EU, and China.

Yan has significant experience assisting multinational companies navigating the rapidly-evolving Chinese cybersecurity and data privacy rules. Her work includes high-stakes compliance advice on strategic issues such as data localization and cross border data transfer, as well as data protection advice in the context of strategic transactions. She also advises leading Chinese technology companies on global data governance issues and on compliance matters in major jurisdictions such as the European Union and the United States.

Yan regularly contributes to the development of data privacy and cybersecurity rules and standards in China. She chairs Covington’s membership in two working groups of China’s National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (“TC260”), and serves as an expert in China’s standard-setting group for Artificial Intelligence and Ethics.

Yan is named as Global Data Review’s “40 under 40” in 2018 and is frequently quoted by leading media outlets including the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

Nathan Sanders (opens in new tab), Harvard University

I am a US-based data scientist focused on creating open technology to help vulnerable communities and all stakeholders participate in the analysis and development of American public policy. In 2021, I began exploring the potential impacts of AI systems on democratic and legislative processes with Bruce Schneier in a paper titled, “Machine Learning Featurizations for AI Hacking of Political Systems.” We have translated these ideas to a general audience in pieces for the New York Times and other outlets. As a past Fellow and Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, I co-direct the Climate Justice Design Fellowship program. As an ML researcher, I have built and led data science teams in the media and biotech industries, served as a Policy Fellow in the Massachusetts state legislature, and co-founded three international organizations that support early career science communicators. I serve on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Physics and am an Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review. I did my undergraduate work in Physics and Astrophysics at Michigan State University and earned my PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University.

Haochen Sun (opens in new tab), Hong Kong University

Haochen Sun is the Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, specializing in intellectual property, technology law, and Chinese law. He has won multiple research prizes and grants for his work on intellectual property protection and technology law. He is the author of Technology and the Public Interest, co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright Limitations and Exceptions in Comparative Perspective, and The Luxury Economy and Intellectual Property. Haochen has organized international conferences, delivered public lectures at leading law schools globally, and served as a visiting professor of law at the University of California Davis School of Law and the University of North Carolina School of Law. He has advised major law firms and companies in the entertainment, information technology, and luxury sectors on intellectual property protection. Haochen is a highly respected expert in intellectual property and technology law, featured in various media outlets such as BBC News, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Maosong Sun (opens in new tab), Tsinghua University

Dr. Maosong Sun is a professor at Tsinghua University in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, and the executive deputy of Tsinghua Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Sun is also a member of the Academy of Europe, ACL Fellow, CAAI Fellow and CIPS Fellow. His research interests include natural language processing, machine learning, computational social science, computational humanities and pedagogy. He has published over 400 papers in top-tier journals and conferences like Computational Linguistics, Nature Communications, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, WWW and SIGIR, which have been cited more than 30,000 times with an h-index of 76 in total and received ACM MM Best Paper Award and ACL Best Demo Paper Award. He also works as the co-director of NUS NExT++ Research Centre, a visiting professor of NUS, an adjunct professor of China Central Conservatory of Music, and the consultant for China State Language Commission.

Florian Tramèr (opens in new tab), ETH Zürich

Florian Tramèr is an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zurich.

His research interests lie in Computer Security, Cryptography and Machine Learning security. In his current work, he studies the worst-case behavior of Deep Learning systems from an adversarial perspective, to understand and mitigate long-term threats to the safety and privacy of users.

Jacques de Werra (opens in new tab), Digital Law Center, Université de Genève

Jacques de Werra is Professor of contract law and intellectual property (IP) law and Director of the Digital Law Center (www.digitallawcenter.ch (opens in new tab)) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva. From 2015 until 2019, he was Vice-Rector of the University of Geneva in charge of leading the University’s digital strategy. Jacques de Werra has taught as visiting professor at leading universities including Harvard Law School (as Charles Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law for a course on international intellectual property transactions in the winter term 2022), Stanford Law School, Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Nagoya University and City University of Hong Kong. He has practiced law (commercial law, IP law and arbitration) in Switzerland (Geneva and Zurich) at a major business law firm and has obtained an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School and was admitted to the New York bar (in addition to his admission to the Swiss bar). Jacques de Werra is an academic expert and legal consultant in IP law, technology & digital law, contract law and he practices international arbitration (as arbitrator and consultant/legal expert). He is member of the Committee of the Geneva Master of International Dispute Settlement (MIDS, www.mids.ch (opens in new tab)). He has widely published in leading law journals (including the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology) and has authored / edited various books of reference including a Research Handbook on Intellectual Property Licensing and The Law and Practice of Trademark Transactions (jointly with Irene Calboli).

Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia

Dr. Xing Xie is a senior principal research manager of Microsoft Research Asia. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in July 2001, working on data mining, social computing and ubiquitous computing. During the past years, he has published over 300 papers, won the ACM SIGKDD 2022 test-of-time award, the ACM SIGKDD China 2021 test of time award, the 10-year impact award honorable mention in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020, the 10-year impact award in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019, the best student paper award in KDD 2016, and the best paper awards in ICDM 2013 and UIC 2010. He is a Fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF) and the IEEE, and a Distinguished Member of ACM.

Huishuai Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia

Dr. Huishuai Zhang is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia.  His main research interests include protection/evaluation of data privacy in the machine learning pipeline, deep learning theory and optimization. His research work aims at understanding the fundamental limits of privacy protection and machine learning, designing efficient and robust learning algorithms.

Jiyu Zhang (opens in new tab), Renmin University of China

Dr. ZHANG Jiyu is an Associate Professor of the Law School and the Executive Director of the Law and Technology Institute at Renmin University of China. She also serves as Vice Secretary-General and Council Member of China Cyber and Information Law Society, Council Member of Intellectual Property Research Society of China, and Vice Director of the Policy and Law Working Group of China AIIA (Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance). She received her B.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in computer science from Peking University, and was a post-doctor in intellectual property law in Renmin University of China between 2011 and 2014. She has been working at Renmin Law School since 2014. Her main research interests include Intellectual Property Law and Digital Law. She teaches Intellectual Property Law, Patent Law, Cyber and Information Law, Artificial Intelligence and Legal Regulation, and IP Protection for Computer Software at Renmin Law School. She has published research papers on IP protection and AI regulation issues, and a book on IP protection issues of ITC Platforms.