Elizabeth Anne Watkins, PhD, is a research scientist in the social science of AI at Intel Labs, where she was the first person in the history of the company to be hired directly to the Intel Responsible AI Council. At Intel she works in both research and governance, ensuring that trust, transparency, and explainability are built into solutions like generative AI and multimodal AI in specialized environments like manufacturing. She has over seven years of experience conducting sociological and policy research around technology implementation and governance, researching AI and work using a sociotechnical lens. 

Watkins’s training is in human-computer interaction, STS, usable security, and organizational sociology. Prior to Intel she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, where she was the first person to hold dual appointments at both the Center for Information Technology Policy and the Human-Computer Interaction group. She’s worked, consulted, and collaborated with research centers across academia and industry including the Princeton Visual AI Lab, Parity.AI, Perceptive Automata, Harvard Business School, MIT, and Google. Her research has been published in academic venues like the conferences on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Algorithmic Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), and the security conference USENIX, and has been featured in WIRED, MIT Technology Review, and Harvard Business Review.  She’s also provided input on artificial intelligence policy to the Mayor’s office of New York City, the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, Canadian Parliament, and the UN.