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 PhD candidate in Law, Science, and Technology at the University of Bologna, where I research the ethics and governance of emerging technologies in different geopolitical contexts. My dissertation focuses on the human rights impacts of XR technologies, but I also research the ethical implications of AI and other technologies. I obtained a master’s degree in 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 also 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 22: How in tarnation do we keep kids safe online?

    In this edition of the Ethical Reckoner, I talk about the battle to keep children safe online--and how safe they actually need to be.

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  • What the AI Act Grand Challenge says about robot regulation

    Based on our experience winning the AI Act Grand Challenge, the LegalAIzers and I reflect on what the new AI Act means for robot regulation.

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  • Introducing the Weekly Reckoning: my newsletter, but weekly!

    Join me every week for a quick rundown of the latest tech news and why you should care, a deep dive into a topic of interest, and something to ponder for the rest of the week.

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  • Global AI governance: barriers and pathways forward

    In this preprint, we discuss the current state of global AI governance and argue that, instead of creating a global AI governance body, we should strengthen what we already have.

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  • Safety and Privacy in Immersive Extended Reality: An Analysis and Policy Recommendations

    In this preprint, we outline safety and privacy issues in XR, argue for using IXR instead, and discuss how EU legislation may regulate it.

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  • Content Moderation in the Metaverse Could Be a New Frontier to Attack Freedom of Expression

    I discuss the politics of content moderation and how VR content moderation might become a way for governments to attack freedom of expression worldwide.

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Things I Think About

The ethics of emerging technology, especially AI and XR.

Tech governance... especially of AI and XR.

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

How to encode ethics into practitioners' workflows.

Making tech ethics accessible.

New coding paradigms.

Rock climbing.

Baking.

Things I've Written

Most publications are OA with embedded links.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

As sole/first/joint first author

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.

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, 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.

As contributing author

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

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 & Engineering Ethics, 2021.

Conference papers

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).

Book Chapters

Roberts, H.*, Hine, E.*, & Floridi, L. Digital Sovereignty, Digital Expansionism, and the Prospects for Global AI Governance. Quo Vadis, Sovereignty? : New Conceptual Boundaries in the Digital Age of China, 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." 2022 Yearbook of the Digital Governance Research Group, 2023. Written for the Vodafone Institute as Vodafone Technology for Good Fellow.

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

Other Things I've Done

I commented on the US 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 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.