Dr. Daig Davenport has been appointed as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley as part of a joint search in technology policy between the Goldman School of Public Policy and the School of Information. His new position will be 50% in the I School and 50% in GSPP, starting on July 1, 2024.

Davenport joins UC Berkeley from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs where he is currently a presidential postdoctoral research fellow. He will be teaching courses in both the I School and GSPP on topics relating to the psychology and economics of information, and data and society.

Davenport’s work is an effective synthesis of economics, psychology, and understanding of algorithms and machine learning to answer important questions about equity and public policy. His primary research identifies ways to shape the societal impact of artificial intelligence by understanding the conditions under which people interact with these tools and the decision processes that follow. His research aims to change policies to the benefit of community development utilizing his intersectional work in economics, psychology, and computer science.

Davenport is a co-recipient of the 2023 Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making and his work received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Paper Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association. His work has been published in top journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Human Behavior, and received media attention from Bloomberg, Boston Globe, Forbes, The Telegraph, and others.

Davenport has a set of ambitious goals for his future research. Currently, he is collecting the first national dataset of local laws with the goal of tracing patterns of systemic racism in the legal system. This ambitious project will be supported by association with I School faculty and student expertise in natural language processing.

“I’m thrilled to join such a storied, supportive, and forward-thinking faculty,” said Dr. Davenport.

“I use lessons from behavioral economics to offer ways to responsibly build and deploy AI. Between the long and rich history of activism in the Bay Area, the deep ties to innovation in the tech community, and the unwavering public mission of the university, there is no better environment for this work.”