I study how software, markets, and law shape one another. I build open source tools for modeling those dynamics. My current work asks what it takes for AI to be trustworthy, safe, and good in the long run.
§Current Projects
- Building scikit-agent, a library for causal economic world modeling. It combines causal game theory with deep learning econometrics, and applies to AI and regulatory design.
- Designing fiduciary AI: turning the legal duties of trusted roles into design requirements for AI systems, and finding organizations that can standardize them. Supported by the Future of Life Foundation.
- Organizing visioning activities to develop new computational foundations for reasoning about sociotechnical ecosystems. 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
e-mail: spb413 at nyu dot edu
