Working Conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation

On May 17th and 18th, 2020 the Program on Negotiation (PON) hosted a virtual working conference on AI, technology, and negotiation.

In 1994 PON convened a conference on computers and negotiation that was prescient in many respects. Much has happened in the last quarter century that no one could foresee. This conference explored the expanding role that technology is playing in negotiations and where it may lead.

The PON Working Conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation was designed to:

  • Convene scholars, teachers, and practitioners to share insights, experiences, tools, and their expectations for further developments.
  • Inform PON and its affiliates regarding opportunities for field research and development of computer-based apps and exercises for teaching.
  • Generate material for a special issue of the Negotiation Journal and foster on-going collaboration.

The conference was in the works for more than a year prior, but in the midst of the global pandemic, remote engagement has become all the more salient on many levels—in business, the marketplace, governance, education, and in our communities. In the field of negotiation, emerging technology holds the promise of promoting creative problem solving, but with it the possible risk of subverting privacy and amplifying inequities.

The PON Working Conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation was co-chaired by Michael Wheeler, Professor Emeritus of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, and James Sebenius, Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Vice Chair for Practice-Focused Research of the Program on Negotiation Executive Committee.

Participation in this conference was by invitation only, but please check out the session descriptions and videos below:

Session A: State of the Art

Ehsan Hoque, Sandy Pentland, and Jonathan Gratch

This panel features three researchers who present how the projected progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could impact the way negotiations take place in the future. With AI’s ability to decipher subtle human behavior, motivations, and persuasiveness as good as humans—in some cases, better than humans—what new possibilities can we envision? Can we train a computer avatar to represent humans in virtual negotiations? Should we? This panel discusses the technological, ethical, and societal implications of how AI could potentially transform the field of negotiations while continuing to promote equality, transparency, and peace.

Session B: Technology and Negotiation – Lessons from Online Dispute Resolution

Ethan Katsh, Leah Wing, Jan Martinez, and Colin Rule

As the pandemic forces public and private institutions to move online, many court and business leaders are looking to the field of online dispute resolution (ODR) for best practices and lessons learned. Developed over the last twenty years (largely in response to the growth of eCommerce) the ODR field has generated a deep well of theory and practice while also identifying potential ethical dilemmas and risks. The four presenters on this panel are leaders in ADR and ODR, with extensive experience as researchers and service providers. They share the story of ODR’s development, describe what we know and what we still need to know, and sketch out a vision for the future where technology (referred to as the “fourth party” in ODR parlance) plays an integral role in how we negotiate resolutions to our disputes across society.

Participants discover of the range of tools and techniques encompassed by various definitions of online dispute resolution (ODR); learn the history of ODR’s development; consider some of the ethical challenges raised by ODR practice; understand the key questions and choices that need to be made in designing ODR systems; and see examples of where and how ODR is being implemented to assist negotiators.

Session C: The Potentially Critical Roles of Social Media in Negotiation

James Sebenius, Alvaro Renedo Zalba, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Ben Cook, and Isaac Silberberg

Although the rise of social media has transformed many sectors of society from politics to news to culture, relatively little attention has apparently been paid to the potentially “first-order” roles that social media does or might play in negotiations, especially those in the public eye. After reviewing the literature on this topic, this panel seeks a) to learn from the experience of current practitioners how social media can affect high-stakes negotiations along with mistakes and best practices in this domain, b) to probe multiple recent negotiations to ask how social media did and might affect the process, and c) to develop tentative diagnostic and prescriptive generalizations about the use of social media in negotiations, especially those in the public eye.

Session D: New Insights into Negotiation’s Psychological Processes 

Alison Wood Brooks, Juliana Schroeder, and Michael Yeomans

This session features three researchers who collect and analyze communication data in experimental settings to understand psychological processes and outcomes in negotiations. They discuss the latest methods for collecting and analyzing communication data—such as natural language processing, identifying nonverbal as well as verbal communication patterns, physiological recordings, and different conversational platforms—with examples from their own research to provide insight into how the structure of a conversation (e.g., the communication medium by which it occurs) and behavior before and after the conversation unfolds (e.g., how people prepare, how many questions are asked, the extent of pauses and laughter) causally change conflict outcomes.

Session E: Technologies that Enhance Students’ Learning of Negotiation

Jeanne Brett, Chris Dede, Emmanuel Johnson, Kristjan Korjus, Samuel Dinnar, and Carrie Straub

Panelists in this session present and discuss several apps designed to enhance effectiveness along several dimensions of teaching negotiation. One of the apps focuses on interpersonal skill-building through negotiating with a digital avatar controlled by a skilled human puppeteer. Other apps support scenario-based training, and organizational learning that can drive cultural change. Digital experiences simulating challenging circumstances generate rich logfiles that enable diagnostic assessment of process skills. Advances in artificial intelligence are making these simulations practical and scalable.

Participants discover the range of tools and techniques available for technology-enhanced teaching of negotiation skills, learn the likely evolution of these tools over the next few years, and see examples of where and how these tools are being implemented to help students learn the multiple dimensions of effective negotiation.

Session F: The Evolving Marketplace

Hyunjin Kim, Beibei Li, and Michael Luca

In recent decades, the rise of platforms such as Airbnb and Uber have allowed for new ways to transact – raising important questions about the design choices platforms make and data they use. More traditional markets are similarly going through a digital transformation, exploring ways to use the new data and technology at their disposal. In this session, Professor Li discusses her research on the use of new data to target customers in offline marketplaces. Professor Luca discusses his work on discrimination in online platforms, and managerial approaches to reduce discrimination. Hyunjin Kim discusses her research on how firms use easily accessible data to inform their decisions.

Session G: Social and Cultural Impacts and Implications 

Sameer B. Srivastava, Jeff Hancock, and Diyi Yang

This session features four researchers who examine the social, cultural, and policy implications of new technologies that are increasingly mediating interpersonal interactions and negotiations. They discuss a broad array of topics such as: (a) the use of AI for detecting and optimizing communication for persuasion, dominance, trust, and even deception; (b) the societal challenges and opportunities of the rise of safety-critical consumer robots; (c) the use of NLP for measuring temporal variation in cultural diversity in work groups; and (d) the application of AI/NLP algorithms to recognize persuasion, detect framing bias, and neutralize language in human-human/machine communication.

Participants are exposed to a breadth of disciplinary perspectives and research methods related to the social, cultural, and policy implications of new technologies for interpersonal communication and group interaction.

 

The panels featured in this conference will be working to produce articles for an upcoming issue of the Negotiation Journal.

To get updates on negotiation pedagogy from the Teaching Negotiation Resource Center, please subscribe to the Teaching Negotiation Weekly Newsletter.

Ehsan Hoque
Ehsan Hoque

Ehsan Hoque is an assistant professor of computer science and an Asaro-Biggar (’92) Family Fellow in Data Science at the University of Rochester, where he leads the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction (ROC HCI) Group. From 2018-2019, he was also the Interim Director of the Georgen Institute for Data Science.

Ehsan earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2013, where the MIT Museum highlighted his dissertation of developing an intelligent agent to improve human ability as one of MIT’s most unconventional inventions. The work has resulted in a patent introducing the idea of a computer being a conversation coach. Building on this patent, Microsoft released ‘Presenter Coach’ in 2019 to be integrated into PowerPoint.

Sandy Pentland
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland

Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland directs MIT Connection Science, an MIT-wide initiative, and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. He is on the Board of the UN Foundations’ Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary General and the UN Foundation, and the American Bar Association, and previously for Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.

Jonathan Gratch
Jonathan Gratch

Jonathan Gratch’s research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. He is the associate director for virtual humans research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a research professor of computer science and psychology, and co-director of USC’s Computational Emotion Group. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995.

A recent emphasis of his work is on social emotions, emphasizing the role of contingent nonverbal behavior in the co-construction of emotional trajectories between interaction partners. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. Along with ICT’s Stacy Marsella, Gratch received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM/SIGART) 2010 Autonomous Agents Research Award, an annual award for excellence for researchers influencing the field of autonomous agents. Gratch is the editor-in-chief of the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, a member of the editorial boards of the journals Emotion Review, and Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. He is the former president of the HUMAINE Association for Research on Emotions and Human- Machine Interaction (now known as the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing), and a frequent organizer of conferences and workshops on emotion and virtual humans. He belongs to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). Gratch is the author of over 250 technical articles.

Ethan Katsh
Ethan Katsh

Professor Ethan Katsh is widely recognized as the father of the field of online dispute resolution (ODR). He is Director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution and Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Along with Janet Rifkin, he conducted the eBay Pilot Project in 1999 that led to eBay’s current system that handles over sixty million disputes each year.

With Professor Rifkin, Ethan wrote Online Dispute Resolution: Resolving Conflicts in Cyberspace (2001), the first book about ODR. Since then, he has published many articles and books on ODR, including (with Orna Rabinovich-Einy) Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes (2017, Oxford University Press), and serving as the co-editor of Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice, which received the International Institute for Conflict Resolution book award for 2012. The frequently mentioned metaphor of technology as a “Fourth Party” was first proposed in Katsh and Rifkin’s Online Dispute Resolution (2001).

Professor Katsh is a graduate of the Yale Law School and was one of the first legal scholars to recognize the impact new information technologies would have on law. In The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (Oxford University Press, 1989) and Law in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 1995), he predicted many of the changes that were to come to law and the legal profession. His articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Legal Forum, and other law reviews and legal periodicals. His scholarly contribution in the field of law and technology has been the subject of a Review Essay in Law and Social Inquiry.

Professor Katsh received the Chancellor’s Medal and gave the University of Massachusetts Distinguished Faculty Lecture in October 2006. In 2010 he received the Mary Parker Follett Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution, and in 2017 he received the D’Alemberte-Raven Award from the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution. In 2014-2015, he was an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Leah Wing
Leah Wing

Dr. Leah Wing is Co-director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR) and Senior Lecturer II, Legal Studies Program, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Leah is a founding board member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution. She heads the Ethical Principles for Online Dispute Resolution initiative of NCTDR and serves on the ABA Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) Standards Taskforce and the ABA Committee on Technology and Dispute Resolution. Leah has taught dispute resolution since 1993 and has served as a researcher on early experiments in online dispute resolution. Her present research projects focuses on ethics and ODR, crowdsourcing and spatial justice, and technological responses to digital harm doing. Leah serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Online Dispute and Conflict Resolution Quarterly, has served two terms on the Association of Conflict Resolution Board of Directors, and is on the advisory board of ODREurope.

Since 1983 Leah has been a mediator and conflict resolution trainer for educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profits. Leah has received the JAMS Award for Outstanding Publication in the Field of Conflict Resolution Education, the Award for Distinguished Service to the Field of Conflict Resolution from the Association for Conflict Resolution, the Kuumba Award in Appreciation of Support and Efforts in Promoting Opportunities in the Field of Alternative Dispute Resolution for Minority Professionals, the Chancellor’s Award for Multiculturalism, the University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences College Outstanding Teaching Award.

Janet Martinez
Janet Martinez

Professor Janet Martinez is Director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution and Co-Director of the Gould Alternative Dispute Resolution Research Initiative. Jan is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, where she teaches advanced negotiation, dispute system design, legal design and alternative dispute resolution law and policy. She is also Senior Advisor with LaxSebenius–The Negotiation Group and a Board Member at the Consensus Building Institute.

Martinez practiced corporate law in San Francisco for ten years before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she completed her Ph.D. at MIT. She has conducted training courses for public and private clients, and facilitated multi-stakeholder policy dialogues involving senior diplomats, industry, government and nongovernmental officials for the World Trade Organization, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the United Nations.

Jan’s current research and consulting focus on dispute system design (her new book Dispute System Design is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2020), online dispute resolution, sustainable groundwater management, international comparative dispute resolution, ocean policy on illegal fishing and forced labor, and negotiation curriculum development for clients in the private (corporate and law firms), public and nonprofit sectors.

Colin Rule
Colin Rule

Colin Rule is Vice President for Online Dispute Resolution at Tyler Technologies. Tyler acquired Modria.com, an ODR provider Colin co-founded, in 2017. From 2003 to 2011 Colin was Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal.

Colin co-founded Online Resolution, one of the first online dispute resolution (ODR) providers, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1999 and served as its CEO and President. In 2002 Colin co-founded the Online Public Disputes Project which applied ODR to multiparty, public disputes. Previously, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (now ACR) in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA.

Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002, and co-author of The New Handshake: Online Dispute Resolution and the Future of Consumer Protection, published by the ABA in 2017. He serves as Chair of the Board of the Consensus Building Institute and as a board member of the PeaceTech Lab at the United States Institute of Peace. Colin received the Frank Sander Award from the American Bar Association in 2019 and the Mary Parker Follett Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution in 2013.

James Sebenius
James K. Sebenius

James K. Sebenius specializes in analyzing and advising on complex business and public sector negotiations. He is a chaired professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches advanced negotiation to students and senior executives. Formerly on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School, he serves as Vice Chair of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, where he succeeded Roger Fisher as head of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He chairs the Harvard’s annual Great Negotiator Award program, which has intensively engaged with negotiators such as Richard Holbrooke, James Baker, George Mitchell, and Bruce Wasserstein. He also co-directs a project that has conducted lengthy videotaped interviews nine former U.S. Secretaries of State, from Henry Kissinger through Rex Tillerson, about their most challenging negotiations.

He is the lead author (with Bob Mnookin and Nick Burns) of Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level. He wrote Negotiating the Law of the Sea, and co-authored (with David Lax) 3D Negotiation and The Manager as Negotiator; his academic and popular articles, negotiation case studies, and multimedia teaching materials number over 250.

He co-founded Lax Sebenius LLC, an ongoing negotiation strategy firm that advises companies and governments worldwide on their most challenging negotiations.  Away from Harvard, he worked full-time for several years for the New York-based Blackstone Group, initially as vice president and has served with the U.S. State and Commerce Departments. He holds a BA summa cum laude, from Vanderbilt, an MS from Stanford’s Engineering School, and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Alvaro Renedo Zalba
Alvaro Renedo Zalba

Alvaro Renedo Zalba is currently the Rafael del Pino-Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain Fellow, at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (HKS), working in the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship. His main research project focuses on the effect of EU foreign policy instruments for transatlantic dialogue-for the purposes of this project, he has interviewed senior government officials from the Trump, Obama, W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. 

A Spanish career diplomat, Alvaro served as Director of the Department of European Affairs and G20 in the Presidency of the Government of Spain (the chief advisor for European affairs and G20 of the Spanish President of the Government) from 2016-2018. In that capacity, he participated in all of the Sherpa meetings on behalf of Spain, both in the EU and the G20. Prior to that, he held different posts in the President’s Office and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Alvaro is also an academic and was Associate Professor in the Complutense University of Madrid (Department of Public International Law and International Relations) from 2014-2016.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook
Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, a German-American, is the founding Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), which examines the challenges to negotiation and statecraft in the 21st century. In January 2018, she was named Executive Director of the newly created Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at HKS. Her areas of expertise include EU-US relations – including security, foreign, and trade policy – and digital public policy in urban and national contexts. In this capacity, she has advised foreign ministries and international organizations across the globe on questions of digital strategy and institutional reform. She previously served on the management team of the European Policy Centre in Brussels (2003-2005), before joining Roland Berger Strategy Consultants as Senior Journalist and consultant in 2005 working in China and across Europe on public policy issues.

She covered European politics and business for CNN-International from London and Atlanta from 1999-2002 and began her public service career as a legislative assistant in the European Parliament and later in the UK House of Commons. Cathryn is a Truman National Security Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow and a Munich Security Conference Young Leader. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration (MPA) from the Harvard Kennedy School, a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics (MSc in European Studies) and is a graduate Brown University, where she completed her undergraduate degree with honors in International Relations and French Civilization.

Ben Cook
Ben Cook

Ben Cook is founder of RedpillStrategies.co, a boutique strategy shop focused on solving the problems organizations face operating in muddy waters across their online information ecosystem.

Redpill Strategies works to empower leaders navigating digital unrest across the manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, consumer, transportation, real estate, nonprofit and finance sectors. Drawing on native fluency in information-era community dynamics – alongside expertise in brand strategy and change, crisis and issues management – RPS helps organizations build or block impactful coalitions, engage effectively with counterparties and manage workforce, patient, activist or other influential stakeholder audiences.

Ben has crafted change and crisis management strategies for Fortune 500 companies including Exxon, Verizon, Aetna/CVS, John Hancock, GSK, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim. Previously, he led commercial strategy at a business intelligence startup, and consulted on countering ISIS recruitment for the White House.

Isaac Silberberg
Isaac Silberberg

Isaac Silberberg is an advisor at Lax Sebenius, LLC and a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. He advises clients on, and researches, complex negotiations.

Prior to his current roles, he worked at a civic tech start-up, where he helped sell the first blockchain voting system used in an American federal election. He has served as a local elected official, and worked in financial operations for a national political organization. He has a degree in Economics from MIT.

Alison Wood Brooks
Alison Wood Brooks

Alison Wood Brooks is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches a cutting-edge course in the MBA curriculum based on her research called “How to talk gooder in business and life,” an experiential course designed to help students hone four core conversational skills through practice (TALK): Topic selection, Asking questions, Levity, and Kindness. She is affiliated with the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. Unanimously voted the worst conversationalist in her family, she is definitely not doing this research and teaching out of spite.

Juliana Schroeder
Juliana Schroeder

Juliana Schroeder is an award-winning Assistant Professor in the Management of Organizations group and Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business. She is a faculty affiliate in the Social Psychology Department, the Cognition Department, and the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley. She teaches the Negotiations and Conflict Resolution course at Haas. Juliana’s research examines the psychological processes underlying how people think about the minds of those around them, and how their judgments then influence their decisions and interactions. Juliana is the co-founder and co-director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, which supports research on the psychological consequences of technological advancements. Her family cannot understand why, given that she has studied “mind reading” for over 10 years, she continues to be so bad at it.

Michael Yeomans
Michael Yeomans

Michael Yeomans is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School, and a faculty fellow at the Imperial College Data Science Institute. Prior to this role, he served as a post-doctoral fellow for Harvard Business School, and for Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research focuses on the digital transformation of conversation – how machine learning and natural language processing can be used to improve the ways we connect with and learn from each other. He has published research in top journals studying many types of important conversations outside the lab, including online education, negotiations, recommender systems, workplace feedback, and speed dating. Outside of work, Michael enjoys committing conversational mistakes with his friends and loved ones.

Jeanne Brett
Jeanne Brett

Jeanne Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr. Professor Emerita of Dispute Resolution and Organizations, Northwestern University. Her research on dispute resolution see Getting Disputes Resolved with William Ury and Stephen Goldberg led to the development of the field of dispute systems design. Her award winning book, Negotiating Globally summarizes her most recent research on how culture affects how negotiators use strategy. She was a founder and until 2016, the director of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at the Kellogg School of Management. She is currently the president of negotiationandteamresources.com, a not for profit organization that distributes teaching materials and supports young scholars doing research in the fields of negotiation and teamwork.

Chris Dede
Chris Dede

Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE). His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. From 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Expert at NSF, Directorate of Education and Human Resources. Chris has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educational and Psychological Assessment and a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Expert Panel on Technology. Chris also was an International Steering Committee member for the Second International Technology in Education Study. His recent co-edited books include: Teacher Learning in the Digital Age: Online Professional Development in STEM Education; Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities in Education; Learning engineering for online education: Theoretical contexts and design-based examples; and The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy.

Emmanuel Johnson
Emmanuel Johnson

Emmanuel Johnson is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) advised by Jonathan Gratch. His research explores the benefits of AI simulations that provide personalized feedback for negotiation training. His work is supported through a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to USC, Emmanuel completed a Masters in Robotics at the University of Birmingham in England through a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from North Carolina A&T.

Kristjan Korjus
Kristjan Korjus

Kristjan Korjus is a Co-Founder and CTO of Pactum. Pactum is an AI-based system that customizes global companies’ commercial negotiations on a massive scale. Kristjan was an AI lead at Starship Technologies where his team improved the safety of their autonomous delivery robots by 100 percent. He also led the team that replicated the DeepMind’s self-learning Atari playing AI. He is co-author of the best selling book, Bedside Reading about Mathematics. His Ph.D. in AI and First Class Honours Master’s Degree in Mathematics from The University of Manchester.

Samuel ‘Mooly’ Dinnar
Samuel ‘Mooly’ Dinnar

Samuel ‘Mooly’ Dinnar is an instructor for the Program on Negotiation (PON) and the Harvard Negotiation Institute (HNI). He has contributed to the development and delivery of several experiential courses, including PON Global, Mediating Disputes and Advanced Mediation courses. Dinnar is also a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he teaches negotiation and engineering leadership. He is a mediator, consultant and board advisor with more than 25 years of international experience as an entrepreneur, executive, board member and venture capital investor. His general management leadership has focused on hi-tech, aerospace and education technology, including several start-ups that revolutionized their industry while dealings across various continents and cultures. He is the founder and president of Meedance, specializing in solving complex, high-stakes commercial disputes and resolving highly emotional business conflicts. Born in Boston, Dinnar has lived and worked extensively in Europe and Israel. His academic education includes technical degrees in both aerospace engineering and computer sciences, and the Harvard Business School. He is an FAA-certified flight instructor and rated jet pilot. He is co-author with Lawrence Susskind of the award-winning book Entrepreneurial Negotiation: Understanding and Managing the Relationships that Determine Your Entrepreneurial Success (Palgrave, 2018).

Carrie Straub
Carrie Straub

Carrie Straub, PhD is the Executive Director of Education Programs and Research for Mursion. Mursion is a virtual reality training platform for professionals to practice and master essential workplace skills. She is responsible for leading the design and implementation of virtual reality immersive learning among Mursion’s 80+ educational partners. Straub provides guidance and consultation to leaders, researchers, and educators about how to best leverage virtual reality simulation to elevate communication skills for high-stakes professions. Previously, she was the Research Director for TeachLivE, the project at UCF that originally developed and tested the core technology utilized by Mursion. In that capacity, she planned, directed, and coordinated activities for a national research project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hyunjin Kim
Hyunjin Kim

Hyunjin Kim is a strategy researcher, working at the intersection of firm strategy and economics. Her work explores how the increasing availability of data in the digital economy shapes firm strategy and the nature of market competition. Her work takes multiple methodological approaches, including field experiments and observational data analyses leveraging econometric methods and machine learning.

Beibei Li
Beibei Li

Beibei Li is the Anna Loomis McCandless Chair and Associate Professor of IT and Management at Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Li’s research interests lie at the intersection between social and technical aspects of information technology. She is especially interested in the interaction between human decisions and recent technological disruptions in both online and offline markets. Specifically, the ubiquitous adoption and usage of smart and connected mobile, web and sensor technologies today have completely changed the way individuals behave and make decisions. These smart technologies have led to the pervasive digitization of individual behavior across digital and physical environments at a very fine-grained level. This information provides us with a new lens through which we can better monitor, understand, and optimize the individual decision making. By looking into these digital footprints of individuals and their interactions with technologies, Beibei is interested in designing effective strategies for technology platforms and policy makers to improve technology design and economic welfare.

Michael Luca
Michael Luca

Michael Luca is the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and author of The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World. Professor Luca’s current research focuses on the design of online platforms, and on the ways in which data from platforms can inform managerial and policy decisions. His work has been published in academic journals including Management Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceeding, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. He has also written about behavioral economics and online platforms for media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Slate. Professor Luca serves on the board of directors at the National Association of Business Economics, the academic advisory board of the Behavioural Insights Team, and the advisory board of the CNBC Technology Executive Council and is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Sameer B. Srivastava
Sameer B. Srivastava

Sameer B. Srivastava is Associate Professor and Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology. His research unpacks the complex interrelationships among the culture of social groups, the cognition of individuals within these groups, and the connections that people forge within and across groups. Much of his work is set in organizational contexts, where he uses computational methods to examine how culture, cognition, and networks relate to career outcomes. His work has been published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science. It has been covered in media outlets such as The New York Times, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes. Sameer co-directs the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab. He holds a PhD in Sociology / Organizational Behavior from Harvard University.

Jeff Hancock
Jeff Hancock

Jeff Hancock is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Founding Director of the Social Media Lab and Director of the Stanford Center for Computational Social Science. A leading expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction, Professor Hancock studies the impact of social media and AI technology on well-being, relationships, deception and trust, how we form impressions of others and how we manage others’ impressions of ourselves, and more.

His award-winning research has been published in over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. Professor Hancock’s TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times and his research has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS and the BBC.

Professor Hancock worked for Canada Customs before earning his PhD in Psychology at Dalhousie University, Canada. He was a Professor of Information Science (and co-Chair) and Communication at Cornell University prior to joining Stanford in 2015. He currently lives in Palo Alto with his wife and daughter, and he regularly gets shot at on the ice as a hockey goalie.

Diyi Yang
Diyi Yang

Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech at Georgia Tech, also affiliated with the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT) at Georgia Tech. Diyi received her PhD from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and her bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.  Diyi is broadly interested in Computational Social Science, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and her research mainly looks at how humans use language in different social contexts for different social goals. Her work has been published at leading NLP/HCI conferences, and also resulted in multiple award-winning papers in the top HCI/NLP publication venues. Diyi’s current research combines both theories of social science and machine learning models to examine how persuasion functions in human communication, and how persuasive language can be computationally understood, quantified and generated, particularly in good-faith online communities.