This fall, the Information School (iSchool) is pleased to welcome three outstanding new faculty members: Assistant Professor Devansh Saxena, Teaching Faculty Rachel Erpelding, and Visiting Assistant Professor Dane Leigh Gogoshin. Areas of expertise among the group range from archives to the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), and the three new faces join the department from places including Pittsburgh, Indiana, and Helsinki.
Devansh Saxena, Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Devansh Saxena comes to the iSchool from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he recently served as Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Marquette University after growing up in New Delhi, India.
Saxena started his PhD with a focus on “designing technology for low-resource settings,” he said, including at an autism clinic in Milwaukee. Inspired by his advisor at Marquette, he turned his attention to how AI was being used in government agencies, including the United States Child Welfare System.
In one study, Saxena and co-authors found that child welfare departments tend to design algorithms—which influence the agencies’ decision-making—in ways that ignore critical contextual factors like the notes of caseworkers who work directly with children and parents. This signaled to him that something was amiss about the ways agencies were adopting these cutting-edge technologies. “There’s something going wrong at the earliest stages of that innovation process,” he said.
To address these issues, Saxena said, he has now turned his focus to the earliest stages of the AI innovation process and is seeking to answer new questions through his research, such as:
“What does participatory AI design look like? How do we design AI systems that center well-being?”
Devansh Saxena
His current work is focused on “building computational and design frameworks, methods and tools that support participatory AI design and responsible AI innovation,” he added.
This semester, Saxena will teach both LIS 461, Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy and LIS 501, Introduction to Text Mining. He had a brief previous role as a lecturer in the iSchool in the fall 2022 semester, and he is thrilled to be back in Madison. “I found just the right community here in this department to be able to do this work,” he said.
Off campus, Saxena and his wife enjoy exploring Wisconsin, including kayaking in Door County and the northern reaches of the state. He also added that they are “aspiring yoopers” and hope to take more trips to the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Rachel Erpelding, Teaching Faculty II
An alum of the iSchool’s MA Library & Information Studies, Rachel Erpelding MS’16 remembers her previous stint in Madison fondly, and said she “jumped at the chance” to return as a faculty member.
After discovering a passion for film archives, she said her time as a graduate student enabled her to see how film archiving fit into a larger landscape of libraries, archives, and museums. “A film archive is sort of a library of its own,” she said.
Erpelding served in a variety of roles—at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research—during her time in the MA program. These roles prepared her for a career as a professional film archivist, sparked by her practicum experience at the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. “That really impacted the trajectory of my career,” Erpelding said.
Her next stop was in Virginia, at the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, where she worked with nitrate films collections. “They stopped making film on nitrate in 1951 because of how flammable and dangerous it is,” she said, “but for 50 years cinema was made exclusively on nitrate. So I was working with some of the oldest films out there.” From there, Erpelding took a role at Indiana University, first working on a grant-funded media digitization project then as a teaching faculty member at Indiana’s Luddy School of Informatics and Computing.
This fall, Erpelding will teach iSchool students the nuances of archives in two courses: LIS 734 (Introduction to Archives and Records Management), and LIS 678 (Preservation and Conservation of Library and Archives Materials). She said she will “sprinkle in as much personal experience as I can.”
What Erpelding loves most about her field, she said, is:
“[Archives] is always changing as a field. The excitement and innovation of bringing the past into the future is something I love being a part of.”
Rachel Erpelding
Outside of work, Erpelding spends lots of time with her family, including two kids under two and their “enormous” dog, Leonard.
Dane Leigh Gogoshin, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dane Leigh Gogoshin joins the Information School for an 18-month visiting assistant professorship with a focus on the ethics of data and algorithms. She is very happy to return to the classroom, having spent the last 4 years as a researcher in the ethics of technology at the University of Helsinki while in pursuit of her PhD in philosophy. In her dissertation, she defends a novel view of responsibility and moral agency. With an eclectic and international academic and professional background, including degrees in music and philosophy from France and the U.S., and a stretch working in private industry in Houston, Gogoshin brings a unique perspective to her teaching and research, which focuses on the intersection of moral philosophy and technology.
She expressed excitement to join a department with other faculty members, such as Professor and Director Alan Rubel and Assistant Professor Clinton Castro, pursuing similar lines of research to her own. “Alan and Clinton are working on some of the same topics that my research group in Helsinki has been working on,” including work that applies traditional philosophical ideas of moral responsibility to the age of AI and algorithms. She explained that her work explores “the age-old question of moral responsibility and how it plays into increasingly complex technological and corporate chains.”
In addition, Gogoshin said, “UW–Madison is a really strong program, and I’m excited for the opportunity to teach here.” This fall, along with Saxena, she will be teaching LIS 461, Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy. She said the course, popular among Computer Sciences and Data Science majors, offers her an opportunity to “present deep philosophical issues to a group of students who aren’t necessarily pursuing philosophy, but who are going to need that additional way of thinking about issues they will encounter in future jobs.”
“These are the people that we, the ethicists, need to be speaking to: the future data scientists, information scientists, and computer scientists. They are going to be the movers and shakers in the world of data, algorithms and technology.”
Dane Leigh Gogoshin
Outside of work, Gogoshin loves to spend time with her family, especially outdoors. She finds Madison particularly attractive because it is “a beautiful blend of culture and nature.”