Dr Kate Devlin

Biography

Dr Kate Devlin is a Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. With an undergraduate degree in archaeology (QUB) and an MSc (QUB) and PhD (Bristol) in computer science, her research investigates how people interact with and react to technologies, both past and future. Kate is the author of the critically acclaimed Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines the ethical and social implications of technology and intimacy.

In 2016 she ran the UK’s first sex tech hackathon. Kate is Advocacy and Engagement Director for the UKRI-funded Trusted Autonomous Systems Hub – a collaborative platform to enable the development of socially beneficial robotics and artificial intelligence systems that are both trustworthy in principle and trusted in practice.

Kate is a board member of the Open Rights Group, a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms, and is a campaigner for gender equality to improve opportunities for women in tech. As a science communicator, she provides accessible accounts of robotics and AI in both broadcast and print media.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Intimacy and technology
• Power and bias in artificial intelligence
• Human-computer and human-robot interaction
• Digital cultural heritage

Selected publications 

• Kate Devlin. “Power in AI: inequality within and without the algorithm” in M. Gallagher and A.V. Montiel (eds.) Handbook on Gender, Communication and Women’s Human Rights, Wiley-Blackwell. [In press.]
• Kate Devlin. while (alive) {love me;} in A. Campbell (author, ed.) The Love Makers, Goldsmiths Press/The MIT Press, November 2021. ISBN: 9781912685844 
• Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton. “The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction” in S. Cave, K. Dihal and S. Dillon (eds.) AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, Oxford University Press, April 2020, pp. 357-381. ISBN: 9780198846666 
• Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, 304 pages, Bloomsbury, October 2018, 304 pages. ISBN: 9781472950871 

Teaching

• Programming for non-STEM students
• AI and its impact on society human-computer interaction.

Expertise and public engagement

Kate has a strong track record of public engagement, including frequent participation as an expert voice in the media. She has written for a wide range of mainstream publications, has been featured on BBC Radios 1–5, guested on many podcasts (including an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain dedicated to her work) and made a number of TV appearances, TEDx talks, and numerous other tech and philosophy events, festivals, and comedy nights.