ELSI Think Tank: Explore the Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications of Existing and Emerging Technologies

Linda Bishai

George Washington University

Dr. Linda Bishai joined the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in April 2020, with twenty years of experience in teaching, training, and writing on international law, identity and conflict, security sector governance, and preventing/countering violent extremism. Current work includes military justice reform, international legal norms for space, and the ethical, legal and social implications of the military use of AI. In her previous positions at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Bishai designed and delivered workshops on teaching human rights in Iraq, civic education and violence prevention in Sudan, women’s roles in preventing violent extremism in Nigeria and Kenya and developing effective responses to radicalization and violent extremism in Kosovo. As Director of Research, Evaluation and Learning at the ABA Rule of Law Initiative, Bishai oversaw the activities of a team of legal researchers and monitoring and evaluation professionals working to promote the rule of law by supporting judges and lawyers in partner nations. Her recently edited volume on Law, Security and the State of Perpetual Emergency explores the blurring of law enforcement and defense activities in the counter-terrorism context. Bishai holds a B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics.

Shannon French

Professor

Case Western Reserve University

Shannon E. French is the Inamori Professor in Ethics, director of the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, and a tenured full professor in the Philosophy Department at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio with a secondary appointment in the School of Law. Professor French received her BA from Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) in 1990 and her PhD in philosophy from Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) in 1997. Prior to starting at CWRU in 2008, she taught for eleven years as a tenured associate professor of philosophy at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and served as associate chair of the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law. She founded the first master’s degree program in Military Ethics in the US at CWRU, works with the US and allied military, service academies, and chaplain corps around the world, and held the General Hugh Shelton Distinguished Visiting Chair in Ethics at the Command and General Staff College Foundation for seven years. Her core areas of research are military ethics – especially as it relates to conduct of war, ethical leadership, command climate, sacrifice and responsibility, warrior transitions, ethical responses to terrorism, and the future of warfare – and ethical issues in emerging technology, including artificial intelligence.  She is the author of many scholarly publications, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Ethical Leadership, an associate editor for the Journal of Military Ethics, on several other editorial boards, and is active in the European Chapter of the International Society for Military Ethics (Euro-ISME). She is a Senior Research Fellow for the Simons Center for Ethical Leadership and Interagency Cooperation, an ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Societal Impact) consultant for the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and the RAND Corporation, and a member of the ethics board for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). She serves as the ELSI lead or a primary researcher on major grant projects funded by DARPA, ONR, and other organizations.

Lynette Hammond Gerido

Lynette Hammond Gerido is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Prior to joining CWRU, Dr. Gerido Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, funded by the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) program. She received a PhD at Florida State University School of Information, an MPH at Drexel University, and an MBA at George Washington University, where she became immersed in health policy and disparities research. She spent a summer abroad studying public-private partnerships in universal healthcare systems at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. Dr. Gerido has industry experience in technical program management, software engineering, web development, and visual communications for various federal and academic teams. Dr. Gerido partners with communities in research to inform clinical practice, technological design, and policy. She uses population data to visualize trends in the ethical, legal, and social implications of clinical research, public health campaigns, and consumer health technologies then employs mixed methods to reveal underlying information and communications needs of patients and their families. Her past work explored racial disparities in the uptake of genetic susceptibility testing for hereditary cancers associated with sociocultural barriers to accessing health information, validity of testing results, and access to genetic counseling.

Jesse Kirikpatrick

Dr. Jesse Kirkpatrick is a research associate professor in George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing and Co-Director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center. Jesse is also an International Security Fellow at New America. He has led numerous initiatives to advance Responsible AI in education, research, and policy. He regularly consults on ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI for government and industry, and he has played a pivotal role in developing responsible innovation frameworks and practices in the commercial tech sector and for defense contexts. Prior to joining George Mason University, Jesse was a consultant for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the US Naval Academy. His current book, Drones, Robots, and Super Soldiers: Emerging Technologies and Military Virtue, is under contract by Harvard University Press.

P.M. “Pooch” Picucci

P.M. “Pooch” Picucci is a Research Staff Member for the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Dr. Picucci is a political scientist by training having received a PhD from the University of Kansas and a Masters in National Security Studies from California State University: San Bernardino. He served as the Chair for IDA’s Innovation and Experimentation working group and currently serves as the lead principle investigator for IDA’s support to DARPA on Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications of AI/ML enhanced and autonomous capabilities. His primary work for IDA has focused on the incorporation of human, social, cultural and behavioral factors into the military’s operations and modeling & simulation (M&S) communities. Secondary portfolio elements range across a diverse array of topics including: COIN doctrine, biometrics, non-lethal weapon systems, service personnel diversity management, wargaming, warning intelligence, and population influence operations. He is the author of articles on the challenges of integrating social science methods and, more broadly, socio-cultural knowledge and data into DOD modeling efforts; one of which was nominated for the 2013 Larry D. Welch Award. He has twice been nominated for the InterService / Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) Best Tutorial award.

Mitt Regan, Jr.

Mitt Regan is McDevitt Professor of Jurisprudence and Coordinator of the Program on Law, Ethics, and International Security at Georgetown Law Center, and is a Senior Fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy. He also is a member of an expert group advising the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on legal and ethical dimensions of the military use of AI; an advisor to the NATO Innovation Fund on development and application of Principles of Responsible Use for technology that incorporates AI capabilities; and a participant in two grant-funded projects on human-machine interaction in military applications of AI. 

Professor Regan works in the fields of the law and ethics of military applications of artificial intelligence, international law on the use of force, international human rights law, international criminal law, and military ethics.  He is the author most recently of Drone Strike: Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), and co-editor of Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict: The Challenge to Liberal Democracies (Oxford University Press 2024); Between Crime and War: Hybrid Legal Frameworks for Asymmetric Conflict (Oxford University Press 2023); and National Security Intelligence and Ethics (Routledge 2022).