Dasha Pruss

Assistant Professor

critical data studies, AI ethics, feminist philosophy of science, history and philosophy of science

Dasha Pruss is on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. She is joining the Philosophy Department at the University of Illinois Chicago in fall 2025.

Dr. Pruss an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at George Mason University and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She received her PhD in History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023, where she was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and she holds a BS in computer science. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where she was jointly a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center and a postdoctoral fellow in the Embedded EthiCS program.

Her research critically examines the societal implications of AI/ML systems, with a focus on algorithmic decision-making systems promoted as 'evidence-based' reforms in the US criminal legal system. She has written about recidivism risk assessment instruments, predictive policing tools, electronic monitoring, and other carceral technologies. She has also co-organized efforts to ban facial recognition and predictive policing in the city of Pittsburgh. In 2024, Dr. Pruss organized Prediction and Punishment: Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Carceral AI, which brought together scholars and activists from around the world to address technologies designed to police, incarcerate, surveil, and control human beings. Read the report here: https://carceral-ai.com

Selected Publications

Pruss, D. & Allen, J. (forthcoming). Against AI Jurisprudence: Large Language Models and the False Promises of Empirical Judging. In Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES '25).

Ziosi, M.*, & Pruss, D.* (2024). Evidence of What, for Whom? The Socially Contested Role of Algorithmic Bias in a Predictive Policing Tool. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT'24) (pp. 1596-1608).
*Both authors contributed equally.

Pruss, D. (2023). Ghosting the machine: Judicial resistance to a recidivism risk assessment instrument. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '23) (pp. 312-323).

Pruss, D. (2021). Mechanical jurisprudence and domain distortion: How predictive algorithms warp the law. Philosophy of Science, 88(5), 1101-1112.
Winner of the Mary B. Hesse Graduate Student Essay Award.

Pruss, D., Fujinuma, Y., Daughton, A. R., Paul, M. J., Arnot, B., Albers Szafir, D., & Boyd-Graber, J. (2019). Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter. PLOS One, 14(5), e0216922.

Education

PhD, History & Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. 2023
MA, History & Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. 2020
BS, Computer Science, University of Utah. 2016