Ekaterina Babintseva

Assistant Professor of History

Bio

Ekaterina Babintseva is a historian of science and technology focusing on the history of computing, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence research. Her current book project titled “Learning with Machines in the Cold War United States and the Soviet Union” explores lesser-known episodes in the history of artificial intelligence (AI) by examining a connection between the design of special teaching computers and algorithms, on the one hand, and AI research, on the other. In the mid-twentieth century, researchers in these two opposed countries came to believe that the ways people learn required a rigorous logical quantitative approach. They turned to computer technology and algorithms as instruments that would discipline and streamline how humans absorb information. But their top-down planning of human thinking was repeatedly challenged by the idiosyncrasies of human cognition, which resisted algorithmic control. The attempts to reconcile the tension between rule-based systems and human thinking led to AI approaches that foregrounded less rational qualities of human thinking. This project has been supported by the Charles Babbage Institute; Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; the IEEE History Center; the Linda Hall Library; and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (University of Cambridge).

Ekaterina Babintseva also serves on the organizing committee of the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS). 

Education

Ph.D.: University of Pennsylvania, 2020

Publications

“Rules of Creative Thinking: Algorithms, Heuristics, and Soviet Cybernetics Psychology,” BJHS Themes. 2023; 8:81-95.

“Engineering the Lay Mind: Lev Landa’s Algo-Heuristic Theory and Artificial Intelligence,” in Abstractions and Embodiments, edited by Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.

“‘Overtake and Surpass:’ Soviet Algorithmic Thinking as a Reinvention of Western Theories,” in Cold War Social and Behavioral Sciences: International and Transnational Entanglements, edited by Mark Solovey and Christian Daye. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Department Member Since: 2026