Alexandra Gillespie

Research keywords: HCI, regulation, digital immortality, digital replica

Bio:

Alex is interested in how humans interact with anthropomorphized technologies. Her prioritization of interdisciplinary study and user input are through lines in her evolving research. Alex is from Connecticut, USA. She graduated with honors and distinction from Colby College in Maine, USA in May of 2025. She was a Computational Psychology major with minors in English in Philosophy, so interdisciplinary study has always been a cornerstone of her academic career. During her undergraduate degree, she primarily researched HRI with a a focus on assistive technologies. Her secondary focus was teaching ethics in computer science courses. Her papers have appeared in ACM and IEEE journals and conferences. Now, she’s interested in broadening her research to other forms of embodied technologies, namely forms of digital immortality in the form of digital replicas.

PhD research:

Alex is interested in the development and regulation of digital immortality technologies, namely in how to balance the potential benefits with potential harms for these technologies. While this field remains largely under-researched, over 60 companies publicly offer services from chatbots (often called “griefbots”) to AI-generated phone calls that portray convincing digital replicas of deceased individuals. Alex is interested in determining how to ethically deploy these technologies (if such a thing is even possible) and how to regulate their administration and supervision. To inform these regulator endeavors, she is interested in how users conceptualize the experience of interfacing with artificial but convincing renderings of actual people. She is more broadly interested in how borrowing from other regulatory bodies can inform regulation on novel technologies, thereby limiting adverse effects of innovation.

Supervisors: James Garforth