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.

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.

How should allies deal with a superpower they can no longer rely on? Former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland joins CDDRL to discuss her new book, "Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider's View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People."

Freeland has seen these questions from two sides. As a foreign correspondent, she covered the rise of Russia's oligarchs in the 1990s. As a senior Canadian official, she helped renegotiate the trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The book draws on both careers to examine how power operates inside government, why trade, security and democracy can no longer be treated separately, and how democracies might build coalitions strong enough to resist authoritarian states and domestic oligarchs.

Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) Satre Family Senior Fellow and Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, Kathryn Stoner will moderate the conversation, focusing on democratic resilience, international political economy, U.S. foreign policy, Russia and Ukraine.  Audience Q&A will follow. Books will be available for purchase at the event.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chrystia Freeland is Canada’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Finance. With a background in Russian history, she first gained international acclaim as a foreign correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters, and later served as the deputy editor of The Globe and Mail. Her first book, Sale of the Century, told the story of the struggle between reformers and oligarchs in 1990s Russia. Her book, Plutocrats, established her as a leading voice on global economic inequality. After over a decade in federal politics, including a pivotal role in renegotiating the CUSMA, Freeland resigned from Parliament in early 2026. She has since served as a Resident Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and an unpaid economic adviser to the Ukrainian government.

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.

After the Arab Spring, Tunisia emerged as the one success story to transition to democracy, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its focus on inclusion and power-sharing. How, then, did its democracy collapse in 2021?

Drawing on unique interviews with senior Tunisian officials, alongside three nationally representative surveys of the population, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy points to an overemphasis on compromise, consensus, and power-sharing. Although power-sharing institutions can be useful at the start of a transition, the book finds that extending them beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel by frustrating voters and spurring the rise of populists and extremists. The book takes an in-depth look at Tunisia's transition and then explores how far the theory travels through a quantitative analysis of all democratic transitions between 1942–2020. Overall, the book reveals the dark side of power-sharing, broadening our understanding of the causes of populism, polarization, and democratic breakdown.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sharan Grewal (PhD, Princeton 2018) is an Associate Professor of Government at American University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? Military Legacies and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores why militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. It received APSA’s Best Book in MENA Politics Award and the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. His second book, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in October 2026. His work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Defense Security Cooperation University.

How has Russia sustained its confrontation with the West since 2022, and at what cost? In her new book, Hanna Notte argues the Kremlin is waging a war not only on Ukraine but over the global order itself.

Notte traces how Russia adapted after the invasion. It worked around sanctions, built new partnerships, cultivated support across the Global South and tried to deepen divisions within Western democracies. Her account combines policy analysis with field reporting from more than a dozen countries and interviews with officials, facilitators and ordinary people drawn into Russia's agenda.

The book also examines the domestic consequences. Notte finds that Putin's focus on confronting the West has distorted Russia's economy and moved the country from a tacit dictatorship toward a full one. She suggests Putin may outlast the West, but has gambled Russia's future in the process.

Satre Family Senior Fellow and Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, Kathryn Stoner will moderate the discussion, which will cover Russian statecraft, the durability of autocratic regimes under pressure and what Russia's strategy means for the U.S., Europe and the Global South. Audience Q&A will follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hanna Notte is the Director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. She is also a senior associate (non-resident) with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and with the Kennan Institute. Notte's expertise is in Russia's foreign and security policy. She holds a doctorate and Master's degree in international relations from Oxford University and a BA in social and political sciences from Cambridge University. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher with the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Carnegie Moscow Center. Based in Berlin, she regularly writes for outlets such as the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and ZEIT, among others.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on October 27th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Susan Sawyer

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:

In December 2025, the Australian Government implemented novel legislation aimed at restricting under 16-year-olds from accessing social media. This presentation will 1) review the prevalence of poor mental health in Australian adolescents; 2) present longitudinal data on the causal links between frequent social media use and poor mental health; and 3) provide insights into what has (and what has not) changed as a result of Australia's social media legislation.

About the Speaker:

Professor Susan M Sawyer AM MBBS MD FRACP FAAHMS holds the Geoff and Helen Handbury Chair of Adolescent Health at The University of Melbourne and is director of the Centre for Adolescent Health, a WHO collaborating centre for adolescent health at the Royal Children’s Hospital and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Widely published (>450 peer review publications, >55 book chapters, >66,500 citations, H-index 106), her research, education and advocacy efforts have advanced the field of adolescent health in Australia, the Asia Pacific region, and globally. Susan’s leadership shaped two series on Adolescent Health for The Lancet (2007, 2012), as well as two Lancet Commissions on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing (2016, 2025) - she is currently co-leading a Lancet Commission on the health of China’s adolescents. She was president of the International Association for Adolescent Health (president, 2017-21) and chaired the International Pediatric Association’s Specialist Advisory Group for Adolescent Medicine (2021-23). She is a member of the Australian eSafety Commission’s Academic Evaluation Committee that is overseeing the evaluation of Australia’s novel social media legislation. She leads a longitudinal cohort known as CATS, the Child to Adult transition Study, that has annually collected information on 1200 nine-year-olds for the past 15 years, including data on social media and mental health.