Welcome Dr. Eddie Yang!
The Department is delighted to welcome Assistant Professor Eddie Yang to the faculty!
Dr. Yang recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University's Kellogg Center for Science of Innovation. There, he is working on projects exploring how policies and political institutions shape technological innovation. One project evaluates the impact of industrial policies on the semiconductor industry and examines how AI can facilitate policy-relevant research.
He and his co-authors recently published "The Impact of U.S.-China Tensions on U.S. Science" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their research finds that U.S.-China tensions negatively affected the productivity of U.S. scientists in the life sciences and decreased scientific collaboration between the United States and China.
When asked what motivated him to join Purdue, Dr. Yang noted, "As a scholar of technology, Purdue is an exciting place to be because it has a great group of faculty who work on innovation and technology. Purdue is also one of the few universities where I can get a pilot certificate."
Hired as part of a growing cluster of AI scholars in the Department and the College of Liberal Arts, Dr. Yang brings new perspectives on how AI and politics intersect in authoritarian regimes. In his dissertation and related articles, he explores how censorship and propaganda by authoritarian governments shape the training data used by AI. He employs multiple methods to examine political biases in AI, including audit studies and lab-in-the-field experiments.
Learn more about Dr. Eddie Yang and his research on his research webpage.