Josh is also a Research Associate in Data Ethics at The Alan Turing Institute and a member of the Institute’s public policy programme, where he works with government bodies to translate principles of digital ethics into practice for policymakers. A Turing Doctoral Student, Josh’s research agenda centres on democratic decision-making in the digital era, and he is the author or co-author of work on AI ethics, state surveillance, online agenda-setting and the use of web archives, in publications such as New Media & Society, Minds and Machines, and in numerous edited volumes.
Josh is the Convenor of the Turing’s Ethics Advisory Group and a member of the Turing’s Data Ethics Group, and sits on the Digital Catapult Machine Intelligence Garage’s Ethics Committee. He was previously involved in the Turing’s work with the Information Commissioner’s Office on a framework for algorithmic explainability, and was part of efforts to establish the Ada Lovelace Institute. He is a regular contributor to Monocle 24 Radio.
Digital democracy, big data, the ethics of AI, agenda setting, web archives.
The Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project works with data derived from the UK domain crawl from 1996 to 2013, in order to develop a framework for the study of web archive data and produce a major history of the UK web space.
The project will follow 'big data' from its public and private origins through open and closed pathways into the social sciences, and document and shape the ways they are being accessed and used to create new knowledge about the social world.
21 February 2022
In his latest blog, OII Doctoral Candidate Josh Cowls discusses the launch of 'Truth Social', the new social media platform from former US president Donald Trump and its wider implications for platform governance.
7 July 2020
It will be years before we can fully assess the long-term impact of the enormous and sudden disruption that Covid-19 has caused, but it is already evident that the effects have not been, and will not be, evenly distributed.
23 March 2016
18 February 2016
