Sina Fazelpour

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science

Sina Fazelpour is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at Northeastern University. During 2020-21, he is the Council Fellow on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Data Policy. Sina’s research focuses on issues of justice, diversity, and reliability in data-driven and artificial intelligence technologies. He also works on understanding the concepts and consequences of diversity in social groups and networks. To address these issues, he draws on analytical tools of philosophy, methods of cognitive science, and formal techniques of agent-based simulation and machine learning. His articles on these and other areas have appeared in Philosophy of Science, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Cognition, and more.

Before joining Northeastern, he was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, with a secondary affiliation with the Machine Learning Department. In addition to a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Sina holds an M.Sc in medical biophysics and a B.Eng in electrical and biomedical engineering.

Awards & Honors

Amazon Research Awards. “An Integrated Framework for Understanding Human-AI Hybrid Decision-Making” (co-applicant with David Danks, Zachary Lipton). 2021. $63,000 USD in funding and an additional $40,000 USD in AWS Promotional Credits.
Block Center for Technology & Society, Carnegie Mellon University. “An Integrated Framework for Studying and Regulating Human-AI Hybrid Decision-Making Systems” (co-applicant with Zack Lipton, David Danks). 2020, $60,000 USD
Third PSA Women’s Caucus Prize Symposium for organizing the “Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in Algorithmic Fairness” symposium, 2020
International Policy Ideas Challenge, Global Affairs Canada, 2020
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. “Varieties of Algorithmic Unfairness”. 2019-2021, $90,000 CAD
W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics Graduate Fellowship. “Identity diversity and homophily in epistemic networks”. 2018-2019, $20,000 CAD
Don Brown Graduate Teaching Award, University of British Columbia, 2018
Public Scholars Initiative Research Fellowship, University of British Columbia, 2018, $4,500 CAD and 2017, $8,500 CAD
Templeton Foundation, Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy. “Attention in the Predictive
Mind” (co-PI Rebecca Todd, Madeleine Ransom, Jelena Markovic). 2016, $25,000 USD
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Scholarship, 2014-2017, $105,000 CAD

Selected Publications

Fazelpour, S. & Steel, D. (forthcoming) Diversity, trust, conformity: a simulation study. Philosophy of Science.
Fazelpour, S. & Danks, D. (2021). Algorithmic bias: Sources, senses, solutions. Philosophy Compass.
Dai, J., Fazelpour, S., Lipton, Z. (2021). Fairness under partial compliance: A simulation study. In 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES’21).
Fazelpour, S. (2020). Norms in counterfactual selection. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Ransom, M., Fazelpour, S., Markovic, J., Kryklywy, J., Thompson, E. T., & Todd, R. M. (2020). Affect-biased attention and predictive processing. Cognition.
Fazelpour, S. & Lipton, Z. C. (2020). Algorithmic fairness from a non-ideal perspective. In 2020 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES’20).
Steel, D. Fazelpour, S., Crewe, B. & Gillette, K. (2019). Information elaboration and epistemic effects of diversity. Synthese.
Steel, D. Fazelpour, S., Gillette, K., Crewe, B., & Burgess, M. (2018). Multiple diversity concepts and their ethical-epistemic implications. European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
Ransom, M., Fazelpour, S., & Mole, C. (2017). Attention in the predictive mind. Consciousness and Cognition.
Fazelpour, S., & Thompson, E. (2015). The Kantian brain: brain dynamics from a neurophenomenological perspective. Current Opinion in Neurobiology.