How do citizens navigate the trade-off between the state's promise of security and the protection of civil liberties and democratic norms? What are people willing to sacrifice in exchange for safety, and whose rights are they willing to see compromised?

El Salvador's Régimen de Excepción (RE), in force since March 2022, offers one of the most striking contemporary examples of this dilemma. Over four years, President Nayib Bukele's government has detained more than 80,000 people, while recorded homicides have fallen to historic lows. Yet these security gains have come alongside sweeping restrictions on constitutional guarantees, due process, and fundamental civil liberties, raising profound questions about the relationship between security, state power, and democracy.

In this webinar (presented fully in Spanish), Beatriz Magaloni, Co-Director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), will present the lab's ongoing research on El Salvador's state of exception, examining how citizens weigh security against democratic freedoms, what drives public support for extraordinary state powers, and how perceptions of those detained shape people's willingness to defend fundamental rights.

Bringing the human consequences of these policies into focus, Samuel Ramírez, representing the Movement of Victims of the Regime (MOVIR), one of the few civil society organizations continuing to advocate for victims, will share the experiences of individuals and families affected by arbitrary detention and the suspension of legal protections.

Finally, Manuel Ortiz, Audio Visual Consultant at DAL, will take us behind the scenes of the extensive fieldwork and documentary research that informed the production of El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror, exploring how visual storytelling can document experiences of state repression and bring voices often absent from public debate to a wider audience.

The conversation will be moderated by Rosalva Aída Hernández, Professor and Senior Researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico. An anthropologist whose work bridges academic research and human rights advocacy, Hernández brings extensive experience working alongside communities affected by violence, displacement, and disappearances across Latin America.

The webinar will conclude with a screening of the documentary El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror.
 

Although the Middle East/SWANA region encompasses a diverse range of authoritarian regimes, protests are surprisingly common across much of it. Mass mobilizations such as the Arab uprisings and Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement attract international attention, yet less is known about the thousands of smaller protests that precede and follow them. This talk will examine patterns of protest across the region and explore how repression is changing in the age of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jillian Schwedler is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for the Middle East at Brandeis University. She has served in elected leadership positions for the American Political Science Association and the Middle East Studies Association. She has been a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and is currently Chair of the Editorial Committee for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of Middle East Report.

Prof. Schwedler’s books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (2006), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (with Laleh Khalili, 2010), and The Political Science of the Middle East (with Marc Lynch and Sean Yom, 2022).  Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Contention, and Social Movement Studies.  Her most recent book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (2022) was recipient of best book awards from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Middle East Institute.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on November 3rd from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Pat Pataranutaporn.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

As AI becomes woven into our daily lives and social institutions, we are becoming “cyborgs,” extending our minds and capabilities through technology. But greater technological capability does not automatically lead to greater human flourishing. How can we design AI that strengthens our ability to learn, create, connect, and make thoughtful decisions? In this talk, I will introduce an interdisciplinary approach to building AI systems and studying their effects on people. Through personalized AI prototypes and large-scale experiments, my research explores how AI can both enhance and undermine human decision-making, well-being, relationships, and sense of self. This work combines design, engineering, and qualitative and quantitative research to advance a science of human-AI interaction grounded in human flourishing. I will also explore how research can translate into real-world impact: from an AI digital twin that supports long-term thinking and has reached users in more than 100 countries, to research that has helped shape legislation protecting children from companion AI. Finally, I will discuss our efforts with collaborators across academia, industry, and government to develop the first open benchmark for AI’s impact on people. Together, these projects offer lessons for connecting technical innovation with evidence, public policy, and meaningful social change.

About the Speaker:

Pat Pataranutaporn, PhD is an assistant professor, technologist, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group. He also serves as co-director of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) Research Program.

His research lies at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, where he focuses on inventing, investigating, and inspiring next-generation human-AI systems for human flourishing, applying insights from human psychology to AI and understanding how AI impacts human psychology.

As founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, he leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to develop and study how AI can both augment and diminish human learning, decision-making, critical thinking, creativity, and other critical dimensions of human experience. His group is among the first to investigate emerging phenomena through empirical studies examining how AI reshapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, from emotional dependence on AI companions and cognitive manipulation to false memory implantation, placebo effects of human-AI interaction, and the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence.

His research has been translated into real-world impact, ranging from Future You, a widely adopted AI digital twin for supporting long-term thinking that has been used in over 100 countries worldwide, to research that has shaped legislation protecting children from companion AI, and leading efforts to develop the first open benchmark for the human impact of AI in collaboration with leaders across academia, industry, and government.

Pataranutaporn’s research contributions have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, including ACM SIGCHI venues (CHI, IUI, DIS, ISWC, and AHs), ACM SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, ICML, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biotechnology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM AI).

His work has been highlighted by the United Nations AI for Good forum and featured in Technology Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Atlantic, Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal, and more. His work has also been honored as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions of 2023” and was included in Fast Company’s “2023 World Changing Ideas.”

Pataranutaporn has collaborated with researchers from both academia and industry, including teams from NASA, Stanford Medicine, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, UCSB, UCLA, UC Irvine, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, NTT Data, KBTG, and more.

He serves as an advisor to the Psychology of Technology Institute and Partnership on AI. He also served as co-creator and writer of the Netflix sci-fi anthology series Tomorrow and I, which premiered in 2024.
 

Neither Vladimir Putin nor the war in Ukraine will last forever. What political order is likely to follow, and what would it mean for Russia, Ukraine and the West?

Leonid Gozman, a longtime Russian opposition politician and political psychologist, will examine the scenarios that may unfold. A Ukrainian defeat, he argues, would likely produce a new war almost immediately. The end of Putin’s rule poses its own risks, and the transition could prove more dangerous than the present. Yet Gozman contends that a post-Putin Russia would probably be better for its citizens and the international community, even if members of Putin’s circle remain in power.

That transition, he suggests, may open a narrow window for Russia to resume a path of normal political and economic development. This discussion will consider what such a path would require, what forces could close it, and what role domestic actors and Western governments might play in shaping the outcome.

The event will be moderated by Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Stanford affiliates are invited to attend in person, and all others may join online via Zoom; registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Leonid Gozman was the former president of the Union of Right Forces and former co-chairman of the Right Cause Party (2008–2011). From 2008 to 2013, he served as director of humanitarian projects at RUSNANO, a state-owned enterprise that commercializes innovations in nanotechnology, and from 1999 to 2008, he was executive board member and representative for governmental and NGO relations at Unified Energy System of Russia (RAO UES). An active participant in Russia’s democratic movement who has served as political advisor to Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, he is also the author of eight books and is a lecturer at Moscow State University. He was previously a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and professor of psychology and Russian area studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and was a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on November 10th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Isabelle Hau.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar. The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements.

About the Seminar:

As AI reshapes how we learn, work, and connect, understanding and strengthening human relationships has become an urgent scientific and societal priority. This session invites researchers across disciplines to explore Relational Intelligence (RQ), our capacity to build trust, cultivate belonging, navigate differences, and form meaningful connections. Together, we will examine emerging scientific questions, identify opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and imagine new ways to measure, develop, and strengthen relational capacities. How might we build a future in which advances in artificial intelligence are matched by advances in human connection?
 

About the Speaker:

Isabelle C. Hau is the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, where she brings together learning & brain science, technology, and innovation to advance effective, inclusive, and human-centered approaches to learning.

Previously an impact investor, Isabelle led the U.S. education practice at Omidyar Network and Imaginable Futures, investing in mission-driven organizations that have reached millions of learners. She is the author of Love to Learn and a pioneer of Relational Intelligence (RQ), a framework for understanding and strengthening the human capacities to flourish in an age of AI.

Isabelle serves on the boards of Design Tech High School and EDC, as well as the EdSAFE AI Alliance steering committee, the Brookings Institution Global AI Taskforce, and the World Economic Forum’s Education 4.0 Alliance. Her honors include recognition by Harvard Business School as one of its 100 most inspiring women, being named a 2026 World Education Medal finalist, and receiving the 2026 ASU+GSV Power of Women Award and the 2026 ISTE/ASCD Impact Award. She has also been recognized for her contributions to early childhood education and human-centered AI. She once co-starred with Grover of Sesame Street.

Isabelle earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated from ESSEC and Sciences Po Paris. Her lifelong professional goal is simple: to bring the love of learning to each and every child.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on October 20th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Matt Deverna.

This seminar will be held in-person only. We will not have a livestream or webinar option for this talk.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar. The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements.

About the Seminar:

People increasingly turn to AI systems to make sense of the news and to answer questions about their health. What happens when the answers we get about politics and our own health come from AI? In this talk, I will present two projects on AI and political fact-checking. The first is an experiment testing how AI-generated fact-checks of political news headlines affect people's ability to tell true headlines from false ones. The second is an audit of how well 15 large language models fact-check 6,000 political claims rated by PolitiFact. I will also share ongoing work examining how six AI systems (Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity) respond to general health questions. Together, these studies shed light on when AI helps people separate fact from fiction, where it falls short, and what this means for the growing number of people who rely on it.
 

About the Speaker:

Matt DeVerna is a computational social scientist studying the societal impacts of artificial intelligence, with a focus on how people find information online to form beliefs and make decisions. His research spans human-centered and system-level analysis, pairing large-scale audits of AI systems, such as language models and search engines, with experiments and observational analysis of social media. This work centers on high-stakes domains like news, politics, and public health, where these systems can strengthen or erode both public understanding and public institutions. It aims to help researchers, platforms, and policymakers ensure AI makes our digital spaces more trustworthy and resilient. Matt is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Tech Impact and Policy Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Informatics from Indiana University and an M.A. in Psychology from New York University.

In this seminar, we will hear from Alice Siu, Associate Director of Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab, about their recently completed project: a 2026 "Industry-wide Forum" inviting public input for the future of AI agents through public deliberation.

​Read the paper here: https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/people-shaping-ai-groundbreaking-industry-wide-forum-invites-public-input-future-ai-agents

​In this seminar, Alice will share their method of Deliberative Polling using the AI-assisted Stanford Online Deliberation Platform developed by Stanford's Crowdsourced Democracy Team. "This method involves providing balanced information to participants, facilitated expert Q&A sessions, and small-group discussions."

​She will also share how the project managed to organize and mobilize the large company participants, including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, PayPal, DoorDash, and Cohere. She will also cover some of the regional results from both the US national and India national projects... and probably so much more. We're looking forward to hosting Alice and learning from this exciting work!

​The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public. Note that the discussion is moderated.

This event is hosted by Metagov, a nonprofit research-to-infrastructure laboratory advancing community sovereignty, network governance, and statecraft in the age of AI.