Dr Cian O'Donovan

Dr Cian O'Donovan is the Director of the new UCL Centre for Responsible Innovation and a Lecturer at UCL Science and Technology Studies.

When did you take up this position? What was your position beforehand?

The Centre has been up and running since January. Before then I was a Research Fellow here working on publicly funded research projects. All of that work was about making sense of the people and politics shaping digital change in society – for better and worse. 

When did you join UCL and where were you before?

I've been here since 2018 and I came from my second favourite university department – the Science Policy Research Unit located high up on the Sussex South Downs. 

Tell us about your work at UCL - how do you spend your days, and what makes your role different to similar positions elsewhere?

For example, last Wednesday I was on a school visit in Camden talking to 15-year-olds about the harms and benefits of AI – they were more critical than me. Later I was facilitating a two-hour workshop with UCL PhDs on responsible innovation practices in cybersecurity. 

After that I was working with colleagues planning a session at the UCL hosted metascience conference in July, and I'm desperately trying to finish marking term assessments – which are great, but there's a lot. 

What are some of your favourite things about working at UCL? How have you found it different to previous jobs?

I don't think there's a position like this anywhere, at least not as a social scientist studying innovation. We get to mix a serious commitment to research with deep engagement and building capacity so that the next generation of technologists really are equipped to take care of people and the world. 

Really, it's not a job. It's an immersion into what makes universities tick in the 2020s: scholarship, impact, engaged research and trying to create a culture that sustains all this. 

And at the Centre for Responsible Innovation and at UCL STS it's also about bringing together all sorts of different knowledge and perspectives – creating spaces where researchers and people across society get to challenge pre-conceived notions of what the future looks like what their place in it will be. Proximate to power and the people who can help make this happen, UCL is a site of intense privilege, something that's easy to forget when we're buried in assessments.

Can you tell us about any upcoming research, or future projects that you're looking forward to working on?

The thing I'm most excited about is a new international ESRC-funded project called Public Values Mapping in AI Research – PAIR. Metascience is a revived field of mostly quantitative assessment of indicators that measure, and in theory intervene in, research and innovation systems. 

Our idea is to use the chimney stack of data emitted from AI research (for instance metadata such as citations, funder information, revealed author relationships embedded in journal articles) to see if we can work out the extent to which AI research is actually responding to what society really needs. 

Our team is particularly interested in issues of safety and agriculture. Rather than asking questions of 'how fast?' AI research is proceeding in these domains, we're much more interested in questions of 'what direction?' and therefore 'who benefits?'. 

Have you always been based in London? If not, when did you move here, and how did you find adapting to living in London?  

I got the boat from Dublin to Holyhead in 2004. Possibly London is adapting faster than I am, it's a process of constant adjustment and catch-up. I like to think I'm winning. 

Finally, tell us about your non-work life. Do you have any hobbies, or favourite places to go in London?

I don't know about hobbies, but my favourite field-site for situated social science is the window booth of Bar Bruno, watching the commerce and craziness of Soho roll down Wardour Street.