Alison Powell

Alison Powell is Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Programme Director of the MSc in Data & Society. Her research examines how people’s values influence the way technology is built. Alison started working with community wireless hacker communities in the early 2000s and now experiments with participatory and public engagement methods to investigate how we generate knowledge about technology, citizenship, and our futures. She directs two projects: VIRT-EU, a Horizon 2020 project examining ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities where she is co-investigator, and Understanding Automated Decisions, a university-industry partnership with Projects by IF exploring how to design services to explain how algorithms work, where she is principal investigator. Alison’s published work covers issues of participation, design, policy and access to the evolving internet, from her article “WiFi Publics” published in New Media and Society in 2008 to more recent work on moral and ethical issues in technology design.