A headshot of Emmie. She is white, has short brown hair, and brown eyes. She is smiling and wearing a blue blazer.

Emmie Hine

Welcome to my site! I'm a Research Associate at the Yale Digital Ethics Center (DEC) and a PhD candidate in Law, Science, and Technology at the University of Bologna and KU Leuven. My research focuses on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies in different geopolitical contexts. At the DEC, I research the ethical and policy implications of AI and other technologies, while my dissertation focuses on the human rights impacts of XR technologies. I obtained a master’s degree in the Social Science of the Internet as a Shirley Scholar at the University of Oxford, where my thesis compared American and Chinese AI governance policies. I've published articles about European AI governance and Chinese and American technology policy, and also write the Ethical Reckoner newsletter.

Before I started my PhD, I was a full-stack software engineer at an enterprise data management software company in Boston. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Chinese, with a concentration in Science and Technology Studies, from Williams College. I am proficient in English and Mandarin, but my favorite language is TypeScript 🧑‍💻

Recent Updates

  • ER 37: On climbing competitions and AI governance

    In the latest edition of the Ethical Reckoner, I argue that AI governance should learn from climbing competition strategy. Yes, really.

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  • Global Health in the Age of AI: Charting a Course for Ethical Implementation and Societal Benefit

    In this epic preprint, we distill learnings from our conference in Venice and propose core infrastructure requirements for ethical AI implementation in healthcare.

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  • Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, and Embodiment: A Historical Debate with Contemporary Resonance

    In this paper, I explore the history of VR and cyberspace and how concepts of embodiment have evolved. Even though the tech has changed, what it means for our experiences online (read: who gets harassed) has not.

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  • Governing Silicon Valley and Shenzhen: Assessing a New Era of AI Governance in the US and China

    In this paper, I discuss updates in the US and China's AI governance and what they mean for global cooperation.

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  • Assembly and Expression in Extended Reality: Transposing Human Rights Across Realities

    How does immersion impact the freedoms of assembly and expression and change how we need to think about fundamental rights online?

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  • Counter-Misinformation Dynamics: The Case of Wikipedia Editing Communities during the 2024 US Presidential Elections

    In this preprint, we investigate the nature of election-related misinformation on Wikipedia in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential elections.

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Things I Think About

The ethics of emerging technology, especially AI and XR.

Tech governance... especially of AI and XR.

Tech policy (guess what? Mostly around AI and XR).

The geopolitics of tech ethics and governance, especially regarding China, the US, and the EU.

Relatedly, digital sovereignty and how technology impacts it.

How to encode ethics into practitioners' workflows.

Making tech ethics accessible.

Tech antitrust pros and cons.

Open-source AI.

Rock climbing.

Baking.

Things I've Written

Most publications are OA with embedded links.

As first author

Hine, Emmie. "Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, and Embodiment: A Historical Debate with Contemporary Resonance." Interactive Entertainment Law Review, 2025

Hine, Emmie, Cowls, Josh, and Floridi, Luciano. "Assembly and Expression in Extended Reality: Transposing Human Rights Across Realities." Interactive Entertainment Law Review, 2025.

Wilson, Claudia,* and Hine, Emmie.* "US Open-Source AI Governance: Balancing Ideological and Geopolitical Considerations with China Competition." Policy paper with Center for AI Policy, 2025.

Hine, Emmie. "Artificial intelligence laws in the US states are feeling the weight of corporate lobbying." Nature Index, 2024.

Hine, Emmie. "Governing Silicon Valley and Shenzhen: Assessing a New Era of Artificial Intelligence Governance in the US and China." Digital Society, 2024.

Hine, E., Novelli, C., Taddeo, M., Floridi, L. "Supporting Trustworthy AI Through Machine Unlearning." Science and Engineering Ethics, 2024.

Hine, E., Rezende, I.N., Roberts, H., Wong, D., Taddeo, M., Floridi, L. "Safety and Privacy in Immersive Extended Reality: An Analysis and Policy Recommendations." Digital Society, 2024.

Hine, E., Yousefi, Y., Osivand, P., Brand, D., Kugler, P., Chiara, P.G. "The AI Act Grand Challenge shows how autonomous robots will be regulated." Science Robotics, 2023.

Roberts, H.*, Hine, E.*, & Floridi, L. "Digital Sovereignty, Digital Expansionism, and the Prospects for Global AI Governance." in Quo Vadis, Sovereignty? : New Conceptual Boundaries in the Digital Age of China, 2023.

Hine, Emmie. "Content Moderation in the Metaverse Could Be a New Frontier to Attack Freedom of Expression." Philosophy & Technology, 2023.

Hine, Emmie, and Floridi, Luciano. "The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: In Search of Enaction, at Risk of Inaction." Minds and Machines, 2023.

Hine, E.*, Morley, J.*, Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. "Saving Human Lives and Rights: Recommendations for Protecting Human Rights when Adopting COVID-19 Vaccine Passports." in the 2022 Yearbook of the Digital Governance Research Group, 2023. Written for the Vodafone Institute as Vodafone Technology for Good Fellow.

Hine, Emmie, and Floridi, Luciano. "New deepfake regulations in China are a tool for social stability, but at what cost?" Nature Machine Intelligence, 2022.

Hine, Emmie, and Floridi, Luciano. "Artificial Intelligence with American Values and Chinese Characteristics: A Comparative Analysis of American and Chinese Governmental AI Policies." AI & Society, 2022.

Hine, Emmie. "The Impact of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code on Journalism, Democracy, and the Battle to Regulate Big Tech." in the 2021 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab, 2022.

As contributing author

Morley, J., Hine, E., et al. "Global Health in the Age of AI: Charting a Course for Ethical Implementation and Societal Benefit." Minds & Machines, forthcoming.

Sovrano, F., Hine, E., Anzolut, S., & Bacchelli, A. "Simplifying software compliance: AI technologies in drafting technical documentation for the AI Act." Empirical Software Engineering, 2025.

Fratini, S., Hine, E., Novelli, C., Roberts, H., & Floridi, L. "Digital Sovereignty: A Descriptive Analysis and a Critical Evaluation of Existing Models." Digital Society, 2024.

Ganz, A., Camellini, M., Hine, E., Novelli, C., Roberts, H., & Floridi, L. "Submarine Cables and the Risks to Digital Sovereignty." Minds & Machines, 2024.

Roberts, H., Hine, E., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. "Global AI Governance: Barriers and Pathways Forward." International Affairs, 2024.

Ferruz, N., Zitnik, M., Oudeyer, P-Y., Hine, E., et al. "Anniversary AI Reflections." Nature Machine Intelligence, 2024.

Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Hine, E., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., Wang, V., & Floridi, L. "Governing Artificial Intelligence in China and the European Union: Comparing Aims and Promoting Ethical Outcomes." The Information Society, 2022.

Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Hine, E., Mazzi, F., Tsamados, A., Rosaria, M., & Floridi, L. "Achieving a ‘Good AI Society’: Comparing the aims and progress of the EU and the US." Science and Engineering Ethics, 2021.

Conference papers

Hine, Emmie, Cowls, Josh, and Floridi, Luciano. "Assembly and Expression in Extended Reality: Transposing Human Rights Across Realities." Proceedings of the International Congress: Towards a Responsible Development of the Metaverse (2025).

Hine, Emmie. "Extended Reality is a Fundamentally Mediated Reality." Proceedings of A Metaverse for the Good (2024).

Hine, Emmie. "Governing Silicon Valley and Shenzhen: Assessing a New Era of Artificial Intelligence Governance in the US and China." Proceedings of the Sixth AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Ethics, Intelligence, and Society (AIES '23).

Ashurst, C.*, Hine, E.*, Sedille, P.*, & Carlier, A. "AI Ethics Statements: Analysis and lessons learnt from NeurIPS Broader Impact Statements." Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’22).

Alex, N., Lifland, E., Tunstall, L., Thakur, A., Mahum, P., Riedel, C.J., Hine, E., et al. "RAFT: A Real-World Few-Shot Text Classification Benchmark." 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS ’21).

Hine, Emmie. "Informed Digital Consent for Use of AI Systems Grounded in a Model of Sexual Consent." Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI for People (CAIP ’21).

Do, Q., Campbell, K., Hine, E., Pham, Dzung., Taylor, A., Howley, I., & Barowy, D. "Evaluating ProDirect manipulation in hour of code." Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on SPLASH-E (SPLASH-E ’19).

Press & Op-Eds

"China’s DeepSeek is not the end of Silicon Valley," written for East Asia Forum (2025).

"Export Controls on Open-Source Models Will Not Win the AI Race," written for Just Security with Claudia Wilson (2025).

"US–China AI competition at the crossroads between dialogue and decoupling," written for East Asia Forum (2024).

“China Walks Perilous AI Tightrope,” written for CEPA (2024).

"The Future of AI Policy in China," written for East Asia Forum with Huw Roberts (2023).

Preprints

Floridi, L., Buttaboni, C., Hine, E., Morley, J., Novelli, C., & Schroder, T. "Agentic AI Optimisation (AAIO): what it is, how it works, why it matters, and how to deal with it."

Floridi, L., Buttaboni, C., Hine, E., Novelli, C., Schroder, S., & Shanklin, Grant. "Open-Source AI made in the EU: Why it is a Good Idea."

Rezende, I.E., Hine, E., et al. "Policing across and within metaverses: How immersiveness changes the role of police in cyberspace."

Formisano, G.*, Hine, E.*, et al. "Counter-Misinformation Dynamics: The Case of Wikipedia Editing Communities During the 2024 US Presidential Elections."

Other Things I've Done That You Can Read About

I commented on would-be TikTok substitutes 小红书 and Lemon8 for New Scientist: "Red Note and Lemon8 are not the TikTok refuges you are looking for."

I commented for a BBC article, "How AI turned a Ukrainian YouTuber into a Russian" (a truly wild story).

I was interviewed for a South China Morning Post video, "How deepfakes are reshaping Asia politics."

I gave a keynote on protecting fundamental rights in extended reality/the metaverse for a Foundation Metaverse EU symposium, which I recapped for Metaverse EU here.

I commented on Biden's AI Executive Order for New Scientist: "Biden executive order: How the US is trying to tame AI."

I was interviewed about Chinese AI regulation for The Global Eye.

I was on one of the winning teams of the University of St. Gallen EU AI Act Grand Challenge, which I wrote about for my newsletter here and for Science Robotics here.

I was a guest on the skeptechs podcast talking about the Apple Vision Pro and what it means for the Apple vs Meta XR battle: skeptechs 5.8: Apple in your eye

I commented on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act for New Scientist: "EU's Artificial Intelligence Act will lead the world on regulating AI."