My work spans technology, society, and ethics, with a particular focus on emotional and empathic AI, AI governance, and the risks of AI-enabled manipulation and scams.
I chaired IEEE 7014.1-2026 — the world’s first international standard on emulated empathy and human-AI partnering — and advise the ICO and Ofcom on AI ethics and data protection. I am also a qualified IEEE CertifAIEd assessor, evaluating AI systems against international ethical standards. My most recent book, Automating Empathy (OUP, 2023), examines how AI systems are engineered to elicit emotional responses, and what this means for individuals, institutions, and society.
I work with organisations to think clearly and practically about the ethical dimensions of what they are building. My offer spans four areas: bespoke ethics assessment; desk research, evidence synthesis, and citizen opinion research to understand how the public perceives your type of system; and facilitated workshops for leadership, product, and policy teams.
I work with any organisation whose technologies interact with human behaviour, emotion, attention, identity, or wellbeing — not only AI developers, but also platforms, health and care providers, financial services, education technology, media organisations, and public sector bodies.
This is not a checklist service. It is substantive, contextualised, and tailored to what you are actually building.
Despite regulatory efforts, there is a significant governance gap in managing emotion recognition AI technologies and those that emulate empathy. This paper asks: should …
Riffing off move fast and break things — the internal motto coined by Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — this paper examines the ethical dimensions of human relationships with AI companions, …
Presence is a palpable sense of space, things and others that overlaps with matters of meaning, yet is not reducible to it: it is a dimension of things that hides in plain sight. …
Automating Empathy assesses technologies used to gauge how people are feeling. The book begins by historically situating the belief that by reading the body and its expressions one …
