Biography

Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. From 2024 to 2026, he is also a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Future Flourishing Program, and in 2023-2024 was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Luke’s research explores the history and contemporary effects of artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed to interact with humans. He is especially interested in the application of social and emotional artificial intelligence (AI) systems in disciplines such as psychology, medicine, and education: all areas where AI is deployed to reshape the lives of citizens in the name of societal improvement. His work explores how the organizations developing these tools understand concepts like human emotion, intelligence, and sentience and how those definitions are operationalized in AI applications. Luke’s scholarship also explores the conceptual and philosophical limits of key components of AI systems such as logical inference and interactivity, and the ways in which human values like equality, justice, and privacy can be supported in the design of digital technologies.

Luke has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research in Montreal, QC; a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College, a Fellow and Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and an inaugural Fellow with the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Technology, Society, and Policy. He completed his PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2016 under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum, and holds an Honours BA and MA in History from the University of Toronto.

Luke is the Principal Investigator on Insight Development and Insight Grants funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and is the recipient of numerous competitive internal grants and awards from Western University. Luke’s scholarship has appeared in numerous journals including New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, American Literature, JASIS&T, and The Information Society, and in the proceedings of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences including on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM CHI), Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT), and the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.

Luke's research has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, The Globe and Mail, and on Canada's CBC Radio and CBC Television. He has been funded at various points in his academic career by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Government of Ontario, and New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and its Provost’s Global Research Initiatives.

Luke’s current book project Reordering Emotion: Histories of Computing and Human Feeling from Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence is under advance contract with the MIT Press.

Photo credit | Michael Yacavone