Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Canada, and co-director of Western’s Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies. He is also a CIFAR Global Scholar in the Future Flourishing Program. Stark’s research explores the history and contemporary effects of artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed to interact with humans. Luke has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research; a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Dartmouth College; a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and an inaugural fellow of the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at the University of California Berkeley. Luke received his PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2016, and holds an Honours BA and MA in History from the University of Toronto.

Stark’s research explores the history and contemporary effects of artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed to interact with humans. He is especially interested in the application of social and emotional artificial intelligence (AI) systems in disciplines such as psychology, medicine, and education: all areas where AI is deployed to reshape the lives of citizens in the name of societal improvement. His work explores how the organizations developing these tools understand concepts like human emotion, intelligence, and sentience and how those definitions are operationalized in AI applications. Luke’s scholarship also explores the conceptual and philosophical limits of key components of AI systems such as logical inference and interactivity, and the ways in which human values like equality, justice, and privacy can be supported in the design of digital technologies.

Luke is the Principal Investigator on Insight Development and Insight Grants funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and is the recipient of numerous competitive internal grants and awards from Western University. In 2021, he declined a Google Research Scholar Award in protest of the company's unfair treatment of its AI ethics research team. Luke’s scholarship has appeared in numerous journals including New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, American Literature, JASIS&T, and The Information Society, and in the proceedings of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences including on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM CHI), Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT), and the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.  His current book project Reordering Emotion: Histories of Computing and Human Feeling from Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence is under contract with the MIT Press.

Luke has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research; a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Dartmouth College; a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and an inaugural fellow of the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at the University of California Berkeley. Luke received his PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2016, and holds an Honours BA and MA in History from the University of Toronto.