Bio

Dr. Jana Schaich Borg is an Associate Research Professor in the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University. With colleagues in computer science and philosophy, Dr. Jana Schiach Borg is working on ways humans and AI can work together to improve human moral learning, reasoning, and behavior overall.  Another main thread of her research is dedicated to how “social synchrony”—or coordination of people’s movements, emotions, physiology, and brains over time—impacts social assessments, communication, and behavior, as well as health.  She uses new online platforms combined with machine vision and new mathematical approaches to predict social communication challenges and disorders in many health and mental health domains. 

Her newest research directions in this space aims to understand why loneliness has such a strong impact on our mental and physical health, and how digital interactions and social media impact the types of social synchrony that generate feelings of social “connection” and resilience to life stressors.  In the future, she aims to combine her AI and social synchrony research threads to generate ethical strategies for creating empathic AIs that support social and mental health. Read more about her research.

Dr. Schaich Borg is also an expert in data visualization, teaching the topic for 9 years to students at Duke University and across the world.  Her approach to data visualization draws heavily on her neuroscience background and expertise in decision-making, and is influenced by her dedication to helping data science students have impact on the world around them.  With financial support from Duke University, she has recently started a research program dedicated to using eye-tracking, emotional analysis, and other cognitive science tools to evaluate and revise common data visualization practices so that visualizations have the greatest impact on their audience.  She will be using what is learned from this research to design effective visualizations to explain AI models and to allow users to interact with AI models collaboratively. 

Dr. Schaich Borg’s research draws on concepts and methods from many different fields, benefits from multiple long-term collaborations, and is strongly influenced by her experience training aspiring data science leaders while she was Faculty Director/Director of Duke’s Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science program.  Her approach is highly interdisciplinary, and translates theory to practice to create real-life tools and interventions. 

As part of her commitment to ensuring her science has impact, she is dedicated to engaging the public in discussions about Moral AI and the ways AI impacts society through podcasts, op-eds, keynotes, and her recent book, Moral AI and How We Get There (with philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and computer scientist Vincent Conitzer).  She also participates in efforts to develop Moral AI policy and consults with organizations who want to practice Moral AI. Dr. Schaich Borg is open to consulting with companies and organizations about moral and empathetic artificial intelligence.

Dr. Schaich Borg is currently an Associate Research Professor at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute, co-Director of Duke’s Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making Lab, co-Director of Duke’s Moral Artificial Intelligence Lab, and was the previous Director of Duke’s Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science Program.  Dr. Schaich Borg is also an affiliate of Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute for Brain Science, and Kenan Institute for Ethics, and has taught at Duke’s Master of Quantitative Management Program at Fuqua School of Business. 

She received her BA in the “Philosophy of Neuroscience” from Dartmouth College, her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University (under the mentorship of Drs. Luis de Lecea and William Newsome), and completed her postdoctoral training in the Laboratory for Neuropsychiatric Engineering at Duke University (under the mentorship of Dr. Kafui Dzirasa).  Her online classes on Coursera have been taken by over 200,000 students from across the world. Check out her course offerings.