Deven Desai

Deven Desai is the Sue and John Staton Professor of Business Law and Ethics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller College of Business. He is also the associate director for law, policy, and ethics for ML@GATECH. He was the first and, to date, only academic research counsel at Google, and a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, he studied rhetoric and then went to Yale Law School for his JD. Deven’s work as a professor draws in part on his experience as a litigator handing intellectual property and technology matters with Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, & Sullivan, LLP; in-house counsel for an idealab! Internet infrastructure company; and as part of the policy and fundraising teams on the 2002 Cory Booker for Mayor campaign. Deven’s research focus on disruptive technologies’ effects on assumptions and equilibria in law and society. For example, he wrote some of the first work looking at how digital property affects privacy and inheritance law and the way 3D printing opens creativity while challenging core aspects of patent law. His most recent stream of research takes on critiques about fairness and bias in artificial intelligence and machine learning applying computer science theories such as information theory, network theory, and Rice’s Theorem to fashion viable law and policy solutions. He has also co-edited, with Mark Lemley, a special issue on scarcity, regulation, and the abundance society.