NEW DIRECTIONS 2022

The sixth New Directions in the Psychology of Technology Research Conference was held at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania on November 11-12th, 2022. The conference was co-sponsored by the Wharton Human-Centered Technology Initiative, with support from the USC Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and the Wharton AI for Business Initiative.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Conference talks

Explore the talks from New Directions 2022 here.

schedule

Speaker Profiles

Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a Faculty Leader at Stanford’s Center for Longevity. He studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, in particular, how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. His lab builds and studies systems that allow people to meet in virtual space, and explores the changes in the nature of social interaction. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the co-author of Infinite Reality, and author of Experience on Demand, both Amazon Best-sellers. He earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University.

Melanie Brucks is Assistant Professor of Business Marketing at Columbia University, interested in creativity and innovation. Her research focuses on the processes involved in generating and selecting innovative ideas and on the cognitive and behavioral consequences of technological innovations. Her findings help marketers better design ideation activities to maximize productivity and fuel innovation. She received a Ph.D. in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Poppy Crum is Chief Technology Officer at NextSense Inc. and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. She is dedicated to developing immersive technologies that leverage human physiology and perceptual realities to enhance our experiences and interactions in the world. At Stanford, her work focuses on the impact and feedback potential of immersive environments, such as augmented and virtual reality, on neuroplasticity and learning. She is a U.S. representative to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a member of the Stanford Research Institute Technical Council, and was a fellow of the US Defense Science Research Council. She completed her Post-Doctoral work at Johns Hopkins in Biomedical Engineering; PhD at UC Berkeley in Neuroscience/Psychology; M.A. at McGill University in Experimental Psychology, and B.Mus. at the University of Iowa in Violin Performance.

Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renée investigates the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in understanding how platform algorithms and affordances intersect with user behavior and factional crowd dynamics. She studies how actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, from domestic activists promoting health misinformation and conspiracy theories, to the full-spectrum information operations executed by state actors. She is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O’Reilly Media.

Anindya Ghose is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Technology and Marketing at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business and the Director of the Masters of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) Program at NYU Stern. He is affiliated as a Scientific Expert with Compass Lexecon and is currently working on some of the most highly visible and closely watched antitrust litigation matters in the tech space. In addition, he has consulted with many leading firms on realizing business value from IT investments. He is the author of TAP: Unlocking The Mobile Economy which is a double winner in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards and has been translated into five languages (Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Japanese and Taiwanese). He serves as an advisor to start-ups in the US, India, Hong Kong, Netherlands, South Korea, Singapore, and China.

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing, at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A former Senior Editor at Marketing Science, his research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. He has published academic articles in marketing, computing, law, management, medicine, physics, political science, public health, statistics, and economics. He co-authored the bestselling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award, and he testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising.

Kris Hammond is the director of C3 at Northwestern University and the Bill Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science.  He is co-founder of Narrative Science, a startup that uses artificial intelligence and journalism to turn information from raw data into natural language. His research focus is in developing human capabilities onto machines, and integrating computer science and Artificial Intelligent into all aspects of life.  He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, M.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Philosophy, all from Yale University.

Szu-chi Huang is an Associate Professor of Marketing and R. Michael Shanahan Faculty Scholar at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Prior to her academic career, Professor Huang worked as an Account Manager at JWT Advertising Agency. While at JWT, she managed global brands such as Unilever and Estee Lauder. Her main research interest is consumer motivation. Her research has been published in top marketing, management, and psychology journals, and in the popular press. She has been awarded the American Marketing Association's Rising Star Award (2013), Marketing Science Institute’s Young Scholar (2017), AMA-Sheth Distinguished Faculty Fellow (2017, 2022), and most recently two Early Career Awards from the Society for Consumer Psychology (2020) and the Society for the Science of Motivation (2022).

Amanda Lenhart is the Program Director, Health and Data, at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, and how harassment has thrived in online spaces. Most recently, she co-authored The Unseen Teen: The Challenges of Building Healthy Tech for Young People, a research study that interviewed tech company workers about if and how they design for the digital wellbeing of youth. She currently serves as a board member of the Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, as an advisor to the Wellbeings Youth Mental Health Initiative at WETA/PBS, and as an advisor to the forthcoming Smithsonian Museum of Natural History exhibit Unseen Connections: The Natural History of the Cell Phone.

Daria Loi is Vice President and Head of UX at Fishtail. Her passion is mixing design strategy with participatory research to enrich people’s everyday life. Current appointments include: Democracy Lab Board of Directors; Honorary Professor at Newcastle University Australia; DCODE Network Supervisor; Course 5 Intelligence Client Advisory Board; CETI Institute Executive Council; and columnist for ACM Interactions. Previously, Daria was Principal Engineer at Intel, Head of Design & People Experiences at Mozilla, and CTO Head of Innovation at Avast. In 2018 she was recognized as one of Italy's 50 most inspiring women in tech & received Intel’s Global Diversity & Inclusion Award.

Roger McNamee began his career investing in Silicon Valley in 1982. After managing the top-rated tech mutual fund, he joined Kleiner Perkins in 1991 to create the first crossover fund. In 1999, he founded-founded Silver Lake Partners, the first tech-oriented buyout fund.  In 2003, he joined Bono and others to launch Elevation Partners. At Elevation, Roger mentored Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and was an early investor in Facebook. Prior to the 2016 election, he warned Facebook that its business practices were endangering democracy. He subsequently became an activist for reform of the tech industry and wrote the New York Times bestseller, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Shiri Melumad is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School. Shiri’s research interests include mobile consumer behavior, digital and social media marketing, and the role of affect in consumer psychology. Her most recent research focuses on the distinct psychological implications of smartphone use. Some of her ongoing work examines how smartphone use changes the consumption and generation of online content, as well as consumers’ emotional and physiological reactions to devices.  Shiri holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Marketing from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University.

Michael Platt is Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and holds appointments in the Marketing Department of the Wharton School, the Department of Neuroscience of the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Department of Psychology of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.  His research focuses on the biological mechanisms that underlie decision-making and social interaction, the grasp of which has broad-scale implications for improving health, welfare, and business in societies worldwide. Current interests focus on applying insights and technology from brain science to business, particularly questions in branding, marketing, management, finance, innovation, and performance. Author of The Leader’s Brain (Wharton Press). He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several companies, as well as the Yang-Tan Autism Centers at MIT and Harvard, served on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Brain Science, and co-founded Cogwear Inc, a neurotechnology startup. Michael received his B.A at Yale and his Ph.D. at Penn, both in anthropology, and did a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience at NYU.

Stefano Puntoni is the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School. Prior to joining Penn, Stefano was a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, in the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from London Business School and a degree in Statistics and Economics from the University of Padova, in his native Italy. Most of his ongoing research investigates how new technology is changing consumption and society, with a focus on consumer reactions to automation in the marketplace.

Aner Sela is a Professor of Marketing at University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. He is an expert on how people make choices and form preferences. His work highlights how everyday decisions are shaped by people’s momentary experiences and intuitions, the technologies they use, and seemingly unimportant features of the decision context. He has been repeatedly ranked among the Top 50 Most Productive Marketing Authors, and recognized as an MSI Young Scholar (2015) and an MSI Scholar (2020) by the Marketing Science Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Business from Stanford University.

Miriam Sweeney is an associate professor at the University of Alabama in the School of Library and Information Studies. She studies anthropomorphic interface design, virtual assistants, voice interfaces, and AI through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. Her research is published in international, interdisciplinary journals such as American Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication, & Society, First Monday, and The Library Quarterly.

Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor and 23rd Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science, The Annenberg School of Communications, and the Operations, Information, and Decisions Department in the Wharton School.  His research on network science and computational social science has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Nature, Science, and the American Journal of Sociology. He is the author of three books including Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer. He holds a B.Sc. in physics from the University of New South Wales and a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University.