Anne L. Washington, PhD is a scholar of public interest technology at Duke University.
She holds the Rothermere / Harmsworth Duke Associate Professor chair in Technology Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy. She investigates the governance of emerging digital technologies. Her writing asks questions about the balance of power between human lives and organizations that control digital record-keeping systems. Through the lens of ethics and institutional legitimacy, she examines digital technology intended to serve the common good such as data science, automated decision systems, and artificial intelligence. She is obsessed with knowledge infrastructures that establish the meaning and management of data. Obsessed. Her research interrogates organizational dynamics that impact the legitimacy, creation, analysis, and public release of digital sources. She is an expert in open data, transparency, digital government, and tech ethics. I
n 2019 she testified before Congress on the ethics of artificial intelligence in financial services. In 2020 she chaired the ACM/AAAI Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) Conference. Her research has been generously funded internationally and domestically including fellowships with the Peter Pribilla Foundation of Munich Germany and Data & Society. She spent 2024-2025 at Stanford University as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, CASBS. The National Science Foundation has recognized her work in multiple awards including a five-year NSF CAREER award which funded her lab. The Digital Interests Lab is centered on human empowerment, informed by history, and guided by theory. She also serves on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC. Lurking in libraries after graduating with a computer science degree from Brown University eventually led to a position with the Library of Congress. She began her professional career at Apple and spent eight years in the financial technology group within a major international bank. She holds additional degrees in library and information science (MLIS) from Rutgers University and a doctorate from The George Washington University School of Business.
Having built legislative information systems in Congress, she has a special interest in the transformation of government documents into government data through parliamentary technology and the digital administrative state. A recent publication, such as "Machine-Readable Legitimacy" (2025) draws on this experience. Her 2023 book Ethical Data Science: Prediction in the Public Interest ISBN 9780197693025 was published by Oxford University Press. In collaboration with Fran Berman, she co-chairs the BKC Public Interest Technology (PIT) Working Group.
