Vance Ricks

Vance Ricks is Teaching Professor holding joint appointments in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Ricks earned his doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University.  Before joining Northeastern, Ricks was an associate professor of philosophy at Guilford College. He has published on parasociality and on the implications of social networks for friendship and for gossip. He has co-authored publications on autonomous vehicles and on faculty policies regarding the use of generative AI systems. His teaching and research focus on technology and moral philosophy broadly speaking.

Current research projects are on computer ethics pedagogy and (separately) on parasociality and social robots. He has helped redesign several courses in Northeastern’s introductory- and intermediate-level CS curriculum to embed the teaching of moral reasoning and ethical issue spotting in those courses. He has helped to design and deliver ethics modules based on the values analysis in design / value sensitive design (VSD) framework.

He has published and given talks on both of those projects. In his newest project in the scholarship of teaching and learning as an AI in Teaching and Learning Scholar, under the auspices of Northeastern’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research (CATLR), he is gathering and evaluating evidence of what students think they need to know in order to be “AI literate”.

He has also edited and contributed chapters to the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computer Science Playbook, a guide for computer science instructors who want to incorporate ethical reasoning into their curricula. In 2024 and 2025, he co-led a series of workshops, funded by a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, to help instructors from other institutions design their own “responsible computing” assignments, courses, and curriculum.

In addition to offering ethics modules in CS courses, he mainly teaches: Technology and Human Values (Phil 1145), Debating Ethical Controversies (Phil 1112), and a graduate-level course, Responsible AI (Phil 5110).