Sebastian Benthall, Ph.D.
§ Current Projects
- Designing fiduciary artificial intelligence. Fiduciaries are trusted roles in society with specific legal duties. How can these duties inform the design of Trustworthy AI?
- Simulating the interaction between consumers and financial markets by building SHARKFin with a DARPA-funded team.
- Developing new tools for building and solving lifecycle models in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics for the HARK project.
- Creating methods for using Agent-Based Modeling to hold software accountable to legal regulation. I am (co-)PI, NSF #2131532, with the NYU School of Law, the Agent-Based Modeling Lab at NYU School of Global Public Health, and the International Computer Science Institute.
- Building BigBang, a suite of computational social science tools for studying standards-setting and infrastructure governance, and contributing to the RASP IRTF Research Group.
§ Publications
Research Articles
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Benthall, S., and Shekman, D. (2023). Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO '23).
(preprint)
(acm)
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Benthall, S., Carroll, C.D., David, Z., Liechty, J., Lujan, A., McComb, C., Skar-Gislinge, N. (2022). Simulating Heterogeneous Portfolio Choices and Financial Market Outcomes. Second Workshop in Agent-based Modeling & Policy-Making (AMPM '22). Saarbrücken, Germany.
(link)
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Benthall, S., Hatna, E., Epstein, J. M., & Strandburg, K. J. (2022). Privacy and contact tracing efficacy. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 19(194).
(link)
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Benthall, S. and Vilijoen, S. (2021). Data Market Discipline: From Financial Regulation to Data Governance. J. Int'l & Comp. L., 8, p.459.
(pdf)
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Benthall, S., Tschantz, M. C., Hatna, E., Epstein, J. M., & Strandburg, K. J. (2021). At the Boundary of Law and Software: Toward Regulatory Design with Agent-Based Modeling.. First Workshop in Agent-based Modeling & Policy-Making (AMPM '21).
(pdf)
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Benthall, S., and Strandburg, K. (2021). Agent-Based Modeling as Legal Theory Tool. Frontiers in Physics.
(link)
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Benthall, S., and Goldenfein, J. (2021). Artificial Intelligence and the Purpose of Social Systems. Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society (AIES '21).
(pdf)
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Benthall, S. and Seth, M. (2020). Software Engineering as Research Method: Aligning Roles in Econ-ARK. In Meghann Agarwal, Chris Calloway, Dillon Niederhut and David Shupe, editors, Proceedings of the 19th Python in Science Conference, pages 156 – 161, 2020. doi:10.25080/Majora-342d178e-015.
(link)
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Benthall, S. (2019). Situated Information Flow Theory. Proceedings of the 6th Annual Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HoTSoS).
(pdf)
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Benthall, Sebastian, and Haynes, B.D. (2019). Racial categories in machine learning. Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM, 2019..
(link)
(video)
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Benthall, S., Gürses, S., and Nissenbaum, H. (2017). Contextual Integrity through the Lens of Computer Science. Foundations and Trends in Privacy and Security, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–69, 2017..
(link)
(pdf)
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Benthall, S. (2017). Assessing Software Supply Chain Risk Using Public Data. IEEE STC 2017 Software Technology Conference..
(link)
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Benthall, S. (2016). Philosophy of Computational Social Science. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 12, No 2..
(link)
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Benthall, S., Pinney, T., Herz, J., Plummer, K. (2016). An Ecological Approach to Software Supply Chain Risk Management. Proceedings of the 15th Python in Science Conference, p. 136-142. Ed. Sebastian Benthall and Scott Rostrup.
(video)
(pdf)
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Benthall, S. (2016). The Human is the Data Science. Workshop on Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science. CSCW 2016..
(link)
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Benthall, S. (2015). Testing Generative Models of Online Collaboration with BigBang. SciPy 2015. Ed. Kathryn Huff and James Bergstra.
(link)
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Benthall, S. (2014). Designing Networked Publics for Communicative Action. Jenny Davis & Nathan Jurgenson (eds.) Theorizing the Web 2014 [Special Issue]. Interface 1.1..
(link)
(pdf)
Popular Writing and Trade Literature
- Benthall, S. and Goldenfein, J. "Essential Infrastructures". Phenomenal World. (link)
- Benthall, S. and Haynes, B. "Understanding Race with AI". Public Books. (link)
- Benthall, S. (2009). An open source web GIS solution-the OpenGeo stack. GEO informatics, 12, 40-43.
Technical Reports and Pre-prints
- Nissenbaum, H., Benthall, S., Datta, A., Tschantz, M. C., & Mardziel, P. (2018). Origin Privacy: Protecting Privacy in the Big-Data Era. Technical Report. New York University. (link)
- Benthall, S. (2017) Don't Fear the Reaper: Refuting Bostrom's Superintelligence Argument. Preprint, arXiv:1702.08495 (link)
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Benthall, S. and Chuang, J. (2013) Computational Asymmetry in Strategic Bayesian Networks. Poster at W-PIN+NetEcon 2013, Pittsburgh. arXiv:1206.2878 [cs.GT] (arXiv)
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Fanti, G., David, Y. B., Benthall, S., Brewer, E., and Shenker, S.. (2013) Rangzen: Circumventing Government-Imposed Communication Blackouts. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2013-128, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Jul 2013. (link)
§Software
- SHARKFin, for modeling the interaction between the macroeconomy and the financial system.
- Econ-Ark, for structural economic modeling with heterogeneous agents.
- BigBang, for the analysis of standards-seting, infrastructure governance, and open collaborative communities. A founding technology of the Reserach and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Research Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
- GeoNode, an open source geospatial data management system. It was part of an innovative strategy to leverage open source development practices for international development. There is still a great team working on it and deploying it as a product.
Dissertation
Sebastian Benthall. Context, Causality, and Information Flow: Implications for Privacy Engineering, Security, and Data Economics. Ph.D. dissertation. Advisors: John Chuang and Deirdre Mulligan. University of California, Berkeley. 2018. (eScholarship) (slideshare)
On the Web
github google scholar blog twitter linkedin slideshare
Contact
e-mail: spb413 at nyu dot edu