ASPI News and Events

“All communities need to innovate responsibly. The review will give everyone a say,” says Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs. “I would not want such drones to fly under the radar of public input.”

“There’s no way for Elon Musk to be unbiased,” says University Professor Hamid Ekbia. “He will use his new-fangled role to insert xAI into a dominant position at the expense of competitors who have a history of divergent agendas and philosophies.” 

“If they had strictly stuck to doing technocratic policy and formulated this as a matter of bureaucratic procedure, avoiding terms to which the Republican administration is allergic, maybe that executive order could have stood a chance,” suggests Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs.

When it comes to space exploration, “I would think that this next [Trump] administration is going to be a continuation of the success in the first administration,” says University Professor Sean O’Keefe. “[Trump] prides himself on being very unpredictable, so I wouldn’t put certainty on this, but all signs point in that direction.”

“The global regulation of AI will suffer as a consequence [of new controls], despite the circumstances that call for more global cooperation,” says University Professor Hamid Ekbia. “The political and geopolitical ramifications of this can be huge, enabling more authoritarian and oppressive uses of AI across the globe.”

University Professor Hamid R. Ekbia attended the NASPAA conference in Washington, D.C., and led a workshop and panel discussion on AI policy at SEICon in New York City.   

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company, showcased one of its all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles equipped with the Waymo Driver—the company's automated driving system. 

The Maxwell professor spoke on the role of collaboration in public policy to researchers, policymakers and practitioners from around the world.

The Maxwell School’s 100th anniversary celebration will be held on Oct. 18 in Goldstein Auditorium.

“The risk is greater than zero, that's for sure, and it's certainly higher than anything that has been accomplished on a commercial basis,” says University Professor Sean O'Keefe.

“Levelling Up Innovation in Local Government: An Evaluation of International Smart City Competitions,” co-authored by Austin Zwick, associate teaching professor of policy studies, and Aaron Eben, Maxwell undergraduate student in policy studies, was published by the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Longer storage periods open the data up to potential hacks and misuse, says Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs. “Even if SPD is doing everything right, and I expect them to do everything right, the vendor might have their own policies or data leaks that might be problematic,” he says. 

“We think the current civil service system is badly in need of reform. But the blueprints offered by both left and right are problematic. One side is firmly rooted in a status quo that (inadvertently or otherwise) impedes accountability, and the other could end up politicizing the very civil servants who should be politically neutral,” writes University Professor Sean O'Keefe and his co-authors.

“Residential mobility and persistently depressed voting among disadvantaged adults in a large housing experiment,” co-authored by Assistant Professor of Political Science Baobao Zhang, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI) at Syracuse University seeks to create a collaborative forum among designers, engineers, social scientists, and scholars in the arts and humanities to discuss emerging technologies.

The student-driven award acknowledges faculty who have had a significant impact and positive influence on graduate education because of their superior graduate-level teaching, dedication to departmental and community presence and excellence in research and creative activities. 

Debbie Urbanski '04 visited ASPI to discuss her first novel "After World." The book, released last December, is receiving increasing attention and appraise from across the literary world.

University Professor Sean O’Keefe says whoever is appointed at Boeing will need to be able to listen to the concerns of the industry. In particular, they will need to work hand in hand with its airline customers—from Alaska Airlines to United—to make sure safety issues will be the focus in the months ahead, he says.

The Autonomous Systems Policy Institute, housed in the Maxwell School, is an inaugural member of U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium.