About

Margaret Levi is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University; and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Engineering ethics
• Business
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Ecology
• Biology
• Advertising
• Law
• Finance
• Environmental health
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Environmental planning
• Natural resource economics
• Development economics
• Psychology
• Economic growth
• Geography
• Environmental resource management
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• ESR: Ethics and Society Review of Artificial Intelligence Research

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021 · 14 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Engineering ethics

  Artificial intelligence (AI) research is routinely criticized for its real and potential impacts on society, and we lack adequate institutional responses to this criticism and to the responsibility that it reflects. AI research often falls outside the purview of existing feedback mechanisms such as the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which are designed to evaluate harms to human subjects rather than harms to human society. In response, we have developed the Ethics and Society Review board (ESR), a feedback panel that works with researchers to mitigate negative ethical and societal aspects of AI research. The ESR's main insight is to serve as a requirement for funding: researchers cannot receive grant funding from a major AI funding program at our university until the researchers complete the ESR process for the proposal. In this article, we describe the ESR as we have designed and run it over its first year across 41 proposals. We analyze aggregate ESR feedback on these proposals, finding that the panel most commonly identifies issues of harms to minority groups, inclusion of diverse stakeholders in the research plan, dual use, and representation in data. Surveys and interviews of researchers who interacted with the ESR found that 58% felt that it had influenced the design of their research project, 100% are willing to continue submitting future projects to the ESR, and that they sought additional scaffolding for reasoning through ethics and society issues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethics and society review: Ethics reflection as a precondition to research funding

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 66 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Engineering ethics

  Researchers in areas as diverse as computer science and political science must increasingly navigate the possible risks of their research to society. However, the history of medical experiments on vulnerable individuals influenced many research ethics reviews to focus exclusively on risks to human subjects rather than risks to human society. We describe an Ethics and Society Review board (ESR), which fills this moral gap by facilitating ethical and societal reflection as a requirement to access grant funding: Researchers cannot receive grant funding from participating programs until the researchers complete the ESR process for their proposal. Researchers author an initial statement describing their proposed research's risks to society, subgroups within society, and globally and commit to mitigation strategies for these risks. An interdisciplinary faculty panel iterates with the researchers to refine these risks and mitigation strategies. We describe a mixed-method evaluation of the ESR over 1 y, in partnership with a large artificial intelligence grant program at our university. Surveys and interviews of researchers who interacted with the ESR found 100% (95% CI: 87 to 100%) were willing to continue submitting future projects to the ESR, and 58% (95% CI: 37 to 77%) felt that it had influenced the design of their research project. The ESR panel most commonly identified issues of harms to minority groups, inclusion of diverse stakeholders in the research plan, dual use, and representation in datasets. These principles, paired with possible mitigation strategies, offer scaffolding for future research designs.

  PublisherDOI

• 2020 Fiscal Year Contributors

  Political Science Today · 2021

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Advertising

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  DOI

• The COVID-19 lockdowns: a window into the Earth System

  Nature Reviews Earth & Environment · 2020 · 218 citations

  • Natural resource economics
  • Environmental resource management
  • Environmental planning
  DOI

• Synergistic interactions among growing stressors increase risk to an Arctic ecosystem

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 55 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Ecology
  • Biology

  Oceans provide critical ecosystem services, but are subject to a growing number of external pressures, including overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change. Current models typically treat stressors on species and ecosystems independently, though in reality, stressors often interact in ways that are not well understood. Here, we use a network interaction model (OSIRIS) to explicitly study stressor interactions in the Chukchi Sea (Arctic Ocean) due to its extensive climate-driven loss of sea ice and accelerated growth of other stressors, including shipping and oil exploration. The model includes numerous trophic levels ranging from phytoplankton to polar bears. We find that climate-related stressors have a larger impact on animal populations than do acute stressors like increased shipping and subsistence harvesting. In particular, organisms with a strong temperature-growth rate relationship show the greatest changes in biomass as interaction strength increased, but also exhibit the greatest variability. Neglecting interactions between stressors vastly underestimates the risk of population crashes. Our results indicate that models must account for stressor interactions to enable responsible management and decision-making.

  DOI

Recent grants

• Provoking Preferences by Changing Beliefs

  NSF · $374k · 2007–2011

Frequent coauthors

• James Alt

  University of California, Davis

  82 shared

• Chün‐tu Hsüeh

  81 shared

• Benjamin R. Barber

  81 shared

• Walt Whitman

  81 shared

• Charles Victor Barber

  81 shared

• Neil Kerwin

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  81 shared

• Blade D'Arcy

  81 shared

• Chandan K. Reddy

  25 shared

Education

• PhD, Government

  Harvard University

  1974

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Sarah Jaewon Leeh-151
• Jan Hansenh-130
• Linda Simonsenh-120
• Anna Waldh-119
• Jesse Bloomh-117