karen boyd

I'm a researcher supporting human flourishing at work in a changing economy.

I am the director of research and an economist at the San Diego Regional Policy and Innovation Center, where I use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to support equity and flourishing in the (now and) future of work. I am particularly interested in the impacts of automation and AI on jobs and the job market.

In graduate school, I worked with Dr. Katie Shilton in the Ethics and Values in Design Lab (EViD) at the University of Maryland's iSchool.

In my dissertation, I synthesized prior work in ethical sensitivity in other domains into a three-activity framework and argued it can be productively used to study technologists, especially machine learning engineers; I used the framework to test Datasheets for Datasets, finding that more ML engineers who had a Datasheet available mentioned ethical issues while they worked with an intentionally ethically complicated facial recogntion dataset than engineers who did not have a Datasheet; and used Value Sensitive Design to develop an open source tool that may help engineers build understanding of ethical problems once they noticed them.

I also worked on a survey aiming to understand the organizational, personal, and external factors that influence how privacy enhancing technologies are implemented in mobile applications and a social science family tree that may help students navigate the relationships among ontology, epistemology, methodology, theory, and more.

    Please reach out if you want to talk about or collaborate on any of these projects. To review or contribute to the family tree project, check out the github page and the visualization.

    You can read some of my recent papers:

    I'm also a teacher, a research consultant, and a painter. I intermittently update a blog about productivity, ethics research, and graduate school called "Related Work"

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    Research

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    About Me

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    A painting of mine

    Art

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