Agency & AI: Rotman Panel
2 April 2026, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Join the Rotman Institute of Philosophy’s Human-AI Relationships Working Group for an interdisciplinary discussion on Agency and Artificial Intelligence!
Who: Western University research community
When: Thursday April 2 at 10am-12pm
Where: WIRB 3000
Speakers:
- Isam Faik, Associate Professor, Information Systems, Sustainability, Ivey Business School
- Zoe Kinias, John F. Wood Chair for Innovation in Business Education, Associate Professor, Organizational Behaviour, Ivey Business School
- Dan Lizotte, Director, Rotman Institute of Philosophy; Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science; Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry
- Andrew Richmond, Postdoctoral Fellow, Rotman Institute of Philosophy
- Atrisha Sarkar, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
- Luke Stark, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies
- Bill Turkel, Professor, Department of History, Faculty of Social Science
This interactive discussion will bring together researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to speak about how human agency is understood and transformed in contexts shaped by AI technologies.
Presentations will explore how human agency and AI agents are conceptualized across disciplines, how humans relate to technologies and tools, why agency is attributed to AI technologies, and how individuals negotiate their own agency when interacting with AI.
The event is designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, encouraging shared problem-framing and critical exchange across fields. The discussion will feature short presentations followed by facilitated panel discussion.
Join us for this engaging discussion on Agency & AI – All are welcome! This event will be hosted in person and virtually – select option in registration to be e-mailed a Zoom link in advance*
This panel is hosted by the Rotman Institute of Philosophy’s Human-AI Relationships Working Group.
Questions? Reach out! Contact Rotman’s Research Specialist Paul Arnold at parnold6@uwo.ca
*Please note, online participation will be view only, as online discussions will not be moderated.
Dr. Isam Faik
Associate Professor, Digital Innovation & Sustainability
Isam Faik is an Associate Professor of Digital Innovation and Sustainability at the Ivey Business School, Western University. His research focuses on the relationship between digital transformation and institutional change, including studies on the changing nature of work, digital inequality, and online social movements. His research contexts include healthcare, agriculture, sharing economy platforms, government, and FinTech. Isam’s research is published in leading Information Systems journals including MIS Quarterly, Journal of the AIS, Information & Organization, and Information Systems Journal. He is a Senior Editor at Information & Organization.
Isam received his Ph.D. in Management Studies as a Gates scholar from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He completed his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Engineering from McGill University. Prior to joining the Ivey Business School, he held faculty positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Southampton.
Dr. Zoe Kinias
Associate Professor, Organizational Behaviour & Sustainability
John F. Wood Chair for Innovation in Business Education
Dr. Kinias researches Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), how it connects with identities, and interventions to enable everyone’s success. She recently co-designed a Virtual Reality research and learning tool for team decision-making and generally enjoys working on the boundaries of established practices to create better business education.
She publishes in respected peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology and Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes. Her work has also been featured in a variety of broader outlets, including Bloomberg Businessweek, The Case Centre, Forbes, Harvard Business Publishing, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, the New York Times, Programme Eve, and South China Morning Post. Having lived in North America, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, with recent leadership responsibilities in France and Singapore and now in Canada, Zoe has both a global perspective and a working knowledge of culture.
Dr. Dan Lizotte
Director, Rotman Institute of Philosophy; Associate Professor
Dr. Dan Lizotte is the director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. He also has a joint appointment to the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science and to the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics in Schulich, where he studies artificial intelligence and statistical methodology to support decision making, with applications in public health, primary care, and other areas. He collaborates with researchers in his own departments and in many others including Family Medicine, Kinesiology, Physical Therapy, and the Rotman Institute of Philosophy.
Dr. Andrew Richmond
Postdoctoral Fellow, Rotman Institute of Philosophy
Andrew Richmond received his PhD from Columbia University, where he worked on computation and representation in cognitive science. His current projects investigate the various modes of explanation in cognitive science, especially neuroscience. He tries to blend philosophical, scientific, and historical approaches to these issues. And his work on those issues leads him to a more general argument for methodological nominalism in the philosophy of cognitive science: the idea that, in trying to understand scientific practice, it is rarely useful to think about the properties that technical concepts (representation, function, etc.) might refer to; instead, we should investigate the concepts themselves and their role in science’s explanatory economy — what they help scientists to do, and how. He also has projects on addiction science and the philosophy of mind more broadly.
Dr. Atrisha Sarkar
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Atrisha Sarkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western University. Her research focuses on multiagent systems, behavioural game theory, and the development of computational tools to ensure the safety of human-centric AI systems at both individual and societal levels. Her multidisciplinary research has addressed a broad spectrum of topics, including ensuring safety in human-AI interactions for autonomous vehicles and mitigating polarization on online social platforms. She was also part of the team that built one of the first self-driving cars on Canadian roads. Atrisha’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and conferences spanning areas such as artificial intelligence (AAAI, NeurIPS), robotics (IROS, ICRA), software engineering (ASE, ESE, SoSym), and institutional and organizational economics workshops (SIOE). She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Prior to joining Western, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. Before beginning her graduate studies, she spent eight years in the industry, primarily at IBM software labs.
Dr. Luke Stark
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information & Media Studies
Luke Stark researches the ethical, historical, and social impacts of computational technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). He is particularly animated by how these technologies mediate social and emotional expression, and are reshaping, for better and worse, our relationships to labor, collective action, and each other.
His current book project, Ordering Emotion: Histories of Computing and Human Feelings from Cybernetics to AI, is a history of affective computing and the digital quantification of human emotion, from 1950s cybernetics to today’s social media platforms.
Before joining FIMS, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research Montreal; a Fellow and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College. His PhD is from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and his BA & MA are from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Bill Turkel
Professor, Department of History
William J. Turkel is Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and internationally recognized for his innovative work in digital history. He uses machine learning, text mining, and computational techniques in his study of the histories of science, technology and environment, drawing on many decades of programming experience. He is the author of Spark from the Deep (Johns Hopkins, 2013), The Archive of Place (UBC, 2007) and the open access textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica, (2nd ed 2019). His current research focuses on the use of generative AI in historiography, history and theory, and historical methods. Dr. Turkel is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2018-25).