CMU Names K&L Gates Presidential Fellows
Three remarkable graduate students chosen for their work impacting society
Three Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. candidates — one each from the School of Computer Science, Dietrich College and Heinz College — have been chosen as the 2020 K&L Gates Presidential Fellows.
Sponsored by the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies at CMU, the Presidential Fellowship Program provides financial support to recruit and retain outstanding graduate students pursuing work at the intersection of technology and society. Presidential fellows engage in research that asks how humans interact with technology and how we foresee and respond to the unintended consequences of our work.
María Alejandra Arciniegas Gómez
María Alejandra Arciniegas Gómez was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from la Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She studies philosophy under the guidance of David Danks, and her work focuses on the theoretical and practical conditions under which people provide consent for collection of their personal data.
In nominating Arciniegas Gómez, Danks says, "I have been Alejandra's advisor since she joined CMU. I'm deeply impressed by her ability to pull together multiple ideas into a coherent understanding of a very large cognitive phenomenon. She works to understand the ways in which humans are impacted by the many technologies around us."
Arciniegas Gómez focuses on the nature of privacy and consent in the digital age, an issue she says we are only just beginning to fully understand. "Interdisciplinary approaches have always interested me, and my research at CMU at the intersection of ethics and new technologies was a perfect fit," said Gómez.