By: Lizzie Yang
Edited By: Eric Omorogieva
Have you ever wanted an assignment that lets you take full advantage of generative AI? Have you ever wondered how the algorithm on your dating app works? How about coming up with a creative, albeit malicious, use of AI? If answered yes to all, there is a perfect course for you at SAIS: Information Policy, Strategy, and Design in the Age of AI taught by Dr. Elaine Sedenberg. Offered for the first time at SAIS this fall semester, the course is designed to address the most complex challenges of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, smart devices, and the Internet of Things, while equipping students with the tools to analyze and redesign policy frameworks to mitigate concerns and create a sustainable technology ecosystem. Dr. Sedenberg developed this curriculum to blend behavioral and empirical social sciences with hands-on exploration of today’s most pressing tech policy issues.
Known affectionately to her students as “Dr. E,” Dr. Sedenberg keeps her 6:45 PM lectures lively with a splash of humor and pop-culture memes, which often adds a fresh perspective to the complex challenges in the tech sector. Her crash courses on cookies, artificial intelligence, privacy laws, and ethics equip students to gain a multidimensional perspective on how software engineers design products and how policies should intervene. One of her students, Sabrina Leung (MAIR’25), says “one of the best takeaways from this class is that there are no neutral designs to anything, and that there will always be human bias in policy. As someone with a marketing background who thinks about design, Dr. E’s class has been so fun to be in where we’ve reframed looking at how policies are built.” Noor Menten, a Master of Arts in Strategy, Cybersecurity, and Intelligence (MASCI’25) student, says “The sessions felt like elevated intellectual discussions you’d have with close friends yet grounded in practical insights…After this class, you won’t be able to interact with the world around you without constantly being reminded how much of what you do is dictated by behavioral economic principles.”
Dr. Sedenberg assigned group projects throughout the semester to let students tinker with ChatGPT, conduct case studies on defunct services, redesign imperfect policies, and design dark patterns to let them navigate the intersection of technology, policy and regulation. Hannah Walters-Bootay (MASCI’25) says Dr. E “expertly teaches her students how to develop analytical algorithms for solving complex social externalities from a decision maker’s perspective. Dr. Sedenberg taught us how to identify and eliminate our biases as we develop policy to solve or deter difficult societal problems.”
I sat down with Dr. Elaine Sedenberg, who has delivered 13 lectures at SAIS DC while excelling in her full-time job at Meta, to reflect on her course.
L: Please briefly introduce yourself.
E: I’m Elaine Seidenberg. I currently work at Meta. Previously I got my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley at the School of Information. I specialized in information policy and my dissertation looked at the changing role of the private sector in the research ecosystem and how policy, ethics and privacy was influencing what companies were wanting to do and the challenges they had. Prior to graduate school, I worked at a federally funded research and development center called STPI, the Science and Technology Policy Institute. They advise the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), National Science Foundation, and other federal science agencies, which is how I got interested in different topics.
L: Can you briefly explain your role at Meta?
E: My current role at Meta is as a policy advisor for the President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg. I work across global policy, comms, public affairs, governance, and product teams to help advance strategic initiatives and understand emerging policy issues. I get to use my PhD training to dive into a wide range of issue areas, and collaborate with a range of subject matter experts to develop clear explanations and outline recommendations to company leadership. I am fortunate to both spend time supporting long-term proactive initiatives around issues like transparency, while also getting experience handling high-priority and urgent policy escalations. No two weeks ever look the same, which keeps me intellectually engaged.
L: What’s the most exciting part of your job?
E: When I came out of graduate school, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to work in the private industry. At the time, a job at then-Facebook came up. And what I have been the most surprised with is how much I enjoy working inside the private sector. There’s always more to the problems, more to the challenges than meets the eye externally. And what I really appreciate is having to work through different parts of the challenges, work with other people to fully understand what’s happening and then to try and craft a solution that makes sense. I work on issues that I care about and that are important to the world. Every single day in this job is different. So what I did last week could be very different from what I’m doing in a month. And I appreciate the variety there.
L: Let’s talk more about academia now. Can you explain what information policy is to those who haven’t taken your class yet?
E: Information policy sits at an intersection of topics around tech policy, data management, UX design, privacy, ethics, and covers a range of different perspectives – governments, non profits, researchers, and industry. It’s one way of clustering a set of issues around data and information policy themes, which can be useful given the breadth of relevant issues students are interested in covering.
L: How much of the information policy and behavioral concepts do you think play a role in your current job outside the classroom?
E: Behavioral economics and behavioral sciences in general deeply influence how I dissect problems that I come across in my work and the way that I think about how we should construct a solution to try and make things better. One thing I hope my students come away from the course with is how to lean on empirical evidence when they need to and how to seek that out to shape a solution that isn’t something that they’ve seen before. Even something very tangible like seat belts. What do we think about incentivizing people to require them to buckle their seatbelt or how to incentivize them to do that? And I think ultimately, it’s about framing and thinking about how to frame a problem while also giving people the autonomy, especially when we think about the digital space on how they can live their lives and make choices for themselves, but hopefully nudge people into a particular behavioral pattern or give them the optionality to think about their actions.
So it’s definitely influenced what I do. I think every time that I have taught a version of this course, I always go back to my work and rethink some of the ways that I’ve been viewing problems…The exciting thing about the space is that it’s constantly evolving. The tech policy space is constantly evolving. And I think there’s going to be an endless array of new challenges that we thought we had addressed that have a new element that needs to be thought through.
L: Like you said, the tech world is constantly evolving. How do you keep the curriculum relevant? How do you teach something when it’s evolving so quickly? Maybe you don’t have an answer to certain things in a way some history professors do because there were precedents.
E: Right. Especially the latter part of the course has no answers. We talk about that a lot in our class discussions where there is no right answer and there is no one solution. I think talking about different dimensions of the problem, staying current with what’s happening, what kind of case studies we have, looking a few years back can also be helpful because we’ve come a long way. And things haven’t really changed that much. You can look at different variables, talk through how you would approach them differently if you were starting over. What makes this problem entirely unique from what we faced eight years ago? But the tech space does move really quickly. So that’s where I try to incorporate elements like podcasts or documentaries that might be fresh and give students a reading list that they can follow through if they want to go deeper on a topic. These are the types of courses that every single time I teach them, they change a little bit, which I think is healthy.
L: When I interviewed a couple of students from your class a lot of them mentioned the group assignments. Can you briefly explain your inspiration for coming up with different topics for presentation?
E: Yeah, this is a model that I borrowed from a professor and mentor of mine, Dr. Steve Weber. The presentations are either a case study where you find an example of a policy redesign and you talk through what elements of behavioral science, behavioral economics are built in and what we can learn from that. Students also do a policy redesign and a “break something” case where you’re supposed to turn something and make it almost “evil” or make it so that it achieves a very particular outcome, say making a video streaming app really enticing to users.
What I think is useful about these activities is one, you’re constantly having to come up with new ideas on how to redesign something. How did other people redesign something in the case study? But then in the “break something”, I think it helps to interrogate if something’s behaving in a way that you didn’t intend. How do you think about reverse engineering that and why was it designed that way, even if it were an accident, what kind of elements would you change to either exit or to dial it back. And I think that’s a really useful skill because there’s all kinds of things in the ecosystem that you’ll find and being able to have that interrogation with. I like the idea of having to make these pitches over the weeks because I think that it helps students build the presentation skills. Whether we like it or not, the group dynamics is going to be present in almost every single career that you choose. And then it just gives people a chance to just try an idea that might be bad and that’s okay. I think having that kind of safe space to say something that’s a little outrageous and test if you like that idea or not. If it resonates, that’s a healthy way to push yourself a little bit more.
L: Is there a presentation or memo that was particularly outstanding that could maybe get to the Capitol Hill or Meta right now?
E: There are many of the pitches that could be entire startups. They could be someone on a policy team advising what should be the strategic direction. It’s hard to pick any one because there’s just so much variety across all of the groups. I have been so impressed by SAIS students. I know that this class may not necessarily be what all the classes are like [at SAIS] but I was just so impressed by everyone in our class and their ability to embrace this different class style and feel confident enough to try all these new ideas. I just love hearing all these because they also influence me.
L: What advice do you give SAIS students who want to pursue a career in information policy, AI ethics? What are the particular skills or attitudes you emphasize to prepare them for these real world challenges?
E: First I want all of my students to feel confident enough to apply for jobs in the tech policy space if that’s what they want to pursue and to feel qualified to be able to leverage their background in international relations, political science, history… all of this fantastic training that they have and be able to apply that in the tech policy space and to feel empowered. The great thing about tech policy and information policy is that there’s always a need for different perspectives because these problems intersect with so many other existing areas of policy and disciplines. Students should see their background as making them even more of an asset in this space. Not everyone in the tech policy space needs to be a lawyer or a computer scientist.
If you’re getting up to speed in a new area, certainly with AI and many other issues that are emerging that will continue to evolve rapidly, spend time reading the latest books that have come out, listen to the current podcast, and stay up with the news. I think that can go a really long way in preparing students to enter the workforce in the next few months. It is a field that’s rapidly evolving and many people haven’t been working in AI for, say, a decade. Some have and they’re absolute experts, but a lot of folks have had to get up to speed really quickly. And I think that students who are as bright and capable as the students at SAIS should feel really positive about the fact that with a little bit of effort and discipline, they can actually be able to go into interviews and exhibit quite a bit of knowledge and it’s not as far away or maybe as intimidating as it could appear.
L: If you were attending SAIS right now, is there a course in a particular region or topic that’s not tech you’d like to take?
E: This summer I was on a what we call “recharge” at Meta. It’s basically a sabbatical where we get 30 days off work. I did a big around the world trip and started in Asia. It was my first extended amount of time in Asia and I had such a wonderful experience. I went through Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. I think the Asia Pacific region, APAC, has a very different way of embracing technology. It’s very forward looking. And I would love to spend time learning from experts about that region and understanding the different dynamics, some of the economics and economic policies, because I think it’s going to be a really important region.
L: Lastly, how are you planning to spend your holidays?
E: Well, I will be at home with my family in Austin, Texas and spending time with my dog, Eloise. I’m sure she’s going to enjoy unwrapping many presents, regardless of whether they’re hers or not. But that’s all the fun of Christmas.
