Sebastian Benthall

• Research Director, Information Law Institute, New York University School of Law
• Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute
• External Faculty, New York University Agent Based Modeling Lab

§ Current Projects

• Building scikit-agent, a causal economic world modeling system and scientific library. This combines causal game theory and deep learning econometrics. Applying this to AI system and regulatory design.
• Designing fiduciary artificial intelligence. Fiduciaries are trusted roles in society with specific legal duties. How can these duties inform the design of Trustworthy AI? What organizations can help standardize what fiduciary duties mean for AI? Supported by the Future of Life Foundation.
• Envisioning new directions for computer and information science research for positive change to the sociotechnical ecosystem. Supported by NSF #2437745.

§ Publications

Research Articles

• Benthall, S., and Cummings, R. (2026). Principled Differential Privacy Parameter Tuning with Causal Games. Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '26).
• Benthall, S., and Sivan-Sevilla, I. (2026). Regulatory Contextual Integrity: Adaptively Regulating Privacy as Contextual Integrity. IEEE Security & Privacy. (ieee)
• Choksi, M. Z., Mandel, I., and Benthall, S. (2025). The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '25). (acm)
• Xu, Z., Liechty, J., Benthall, S., Skar-Gislinge, N., and McComb, C. (2024). GARCH-informed neural networks for volatility prediction in financial markets. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance. (acm)
• Benthall, S., and Cummings, R. (2024). Integrating differential privacy and contextual integrity. Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Science and Law. (acm/pdf)
• 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)
• Benthall, S., Carroll, C. D., David, Z., Liechty, J., Lujan, A., McComb, C., and 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)
• Benthall, S., Hatna, E., Epstein, J. M., and Strandburg, K. J. (2022). Privacy and contact tracing efficacy. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 19(194). (link)
• Benthall, S., and Viljoen, S. (2021). Data Market Discipline: From Financial Regulation to Data Governance. J. Int'l & Comp. L., 8, p.459. (pdf)
• Benthall, S., Tschantz, M. C., Hatna, E., Epstein, J. M., and 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)
• Benthall, S., and Strandburg, K. (2021). Agent-Based Modeling as Legal Theory Tool. Frontiers in Physics. (link)
• 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)
• 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)
• Benthall, S. (2019). Situated Information Flow Theory. Proceedings of the 6th Annual Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HoTSoS). (pdf)
• Benthall, S., and Haynes, B. D. (2019). Racial categories in machine learning. Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM, 2019. (link) (video)
• 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)
• Benthall, S. (2017). Assessing Software Supply Chain Risk Using Public Data. IEEE STC 2017 Software Technology Conference. (link)
• Benthall, S. (2016). Philosophy of Computational Social Science. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 12, No 2. (link)
• Benthall, S., Pinney, T., Herz, J., and 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)
• Benthall, S. (2016). The Human is the Data Science. Workshop on Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science. CSCW 2016. (link)
• Benthall, S. (2015). Testing Generative Models of Online Collaboration with BigBang. SciPy 2015. Ed. Kathryn Huff and James Bergstra. (link)
• 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

• Benthall, S., and Lujan, A. (2026). The Design and Composition of Structural Causal Decision Processes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02681. (link)
• Benthall, S., and Clark, A. (2025). Validity Is What You Need. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.27628. (link)
• Nissenbaum, H., Benthall, S., Datta, A., Tschantz, M. C., and 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)
• 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)
• 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

• scikit-agent, a system for causal economic world modeling. Like scikit-learn, but for agent-based modeling and computational economics.
• BigBang, for the analysis of standards-setting, infrastructure governance, and open collaborative communities. This analytics engine serves as the back-end for Article 19's Guess Who! tool, part of their Internet Standards Almanac.
• SHARKFin, for modeling the interaction between the macroeconomy and the financial system.
• Econ-Ark, for structural economic modeling with heterogeneous agents.
• 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)

§Prior Grants, Awards, and Support

• NSF CCF-2131532 and CCF-2131533, "Collaborative Research: DASS: Agent Based Modeling at the Boundary of Law and Software". Creating methods for using Agent-Based Modeling to hold software accountable to legal regulation. A collaboration between ICSI, the NYU School of Law, and the Agent-Based Modeling Lab at NYU School of Global Public Health.
• NSF SBE-2105301, "Heterogeneous agent modeling of the personal data economy". A postdoctoral research fellowship focusing on computational economics methods for information law and privacy research.

On the Web

github google scholar blog linkedin

Contact

e-mail: spb413 at nyu dot edu