Get the latest news
Subscribe to receive updates from the School of Data Science.
Faculty
David Danks
William L. Polk Jr. and Carolyn K. Polk Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science
School of Data Science
Additional Roles
Department of Philosophy
Email: eww3bh@virginia.edu
Additional Contact Information
David Danks is the William L. Polk Jr. and Carolyn K. Polk Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, & Data Science.
Danks’s research sits at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, drawing on methods and frameworks from each to address complex interdisciplinary challenges. His work spans ethical, psychological and policy questions surrounding artificial intelligence and robotics, with applications in transportation, health care, privacy, and security. He has also made significant contributions to computational cognitive science, and has developed novel causal discovery algorithms for complex observational and experimental data.
Previously, Danks was Professor of Data Science, Philosophy, & Policy at UC San Diego, and the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has served on numerous national advisory boards, including the National AI Advisory Committee, the Special Competitive Studies Project, the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology, the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence, and the Topos Institute. His honors include a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Education
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
- A.B. in Philosophy, Princeton University
Data Science Domains
Analytics; Data + Society
Areas of Practice
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Biomedical, Health, and Life Sciences; Business, Markets, and Policy; Data Ethics and Society; Human-Centered Design and Interaction; Theory, Foundations, and Advanced Methodologies
Selected Publications
Books
Danks, D. (2014). Unifying the mind: Cognitive representations as graphical models. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Danks, D., & Ippoliti, E. (Eds.) (2018). Building theories: Heuristics and hypotheses in science. Berlin: SpringerVerlag.
Danks, D., & Harrell. M. (under contract). AI and philosophy: A contemporary introduction. New York: Routledge.
Danks, D., & Trusilo, D. (under contract). AI and (In)security. University of California Press.
Journals and book chapters
Trusilo, D., & Danks, D. (in press). Multi-use AI and moral responsibility: Applying the notion of
reasonable foreseeability to multi-use AI systems. Communications of the ACM.
Wardell, J., Solovyeva, K., Danks, D., Huotari, N., Kiviniemi, V. J., Korhonen, V. O., DeRamus,
T., Pearlson, G. D., Calhoun, V., & Plis, S. (in press). Combining fast and slow fMRI sampling
rates enhances predictive power in resting-state data. NeuroImage.
Amico-Korby, D., Harrell, M., & Danks, D. (2025). Building epistemically healthier platforms.
Episteme, 22, 745-767.
Amico-Korby, D., Harrell, M., & Danks, D. (2025). Do it yourself content and the wisdom of the
crowds. Erkenntnis.
Bakirtzis, G., Tubella, A. A., Theodorou, A., Danks, D., & Topcu, U. (2025). Navigating the
sociotechnical labyrinth: Dynamic certification for responsible embodied AI. In Bi-directionality in
Human-AI Collaborative Systems (pp. 333-348). Academic Press.
Danks, D., & Harrell, M. (2025). Causation across levels throughout the sciences. In P. Illari & F.
Russo (Eds.), Routledge handbook of causality and causal methods (pp. 167-177). New York: Routledge.
Gonzalez Soto, M., Sucar, L. E., Escalante, H. J., & Danks, D. (2025). Choosing with unknown
causal information: Action-outcome probabilities for decision-making can be grounded in causal
models. Erkenntnis.
Kukhareva, P. V., O’Brien, M. J., Malone, D. C., Kawamoto, K., Gouripeddi, R., Reddy, D., Zhang,
M., Deshmukh, V. G., Danks, D., & Facelli, J. C. (2025). Documentation of social determinants
of health for patients with type 2 diabetes in Epic Cosmos. JAMIA Open, 8(5).