Hi! I'm Pegah, a PhD candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, where I study the social and organizational dimensions of digital automation and artificial intelligence. At Cornell, I'm co-advised by Karen Levy and Cristobal Cheyre.
Most recently, I've been studying how self-checkout machines and other self-service retail technologies have been changing frontline retail work. Beyond retail, my research on automation and AI has spanned contexts ranging from behavioral advertising to politics to sports to transportation.
My work is supported by the NSF GRFP, Microsoft Research, and the MacArthur Foundation through the Cornell Artificial Intelligence, Policy, and Practice Initiative.
I have also held research fellowships at the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, the Harvard Data Privacy Lab, and Georgetown S2ERC (now CyberSMART). Before my PhD, I was a project manager at a software company in Washington, DC, where I managed teams of engineers and designers to deliver custom-built products for a variety of Fortune 500 companies.
I hold an M.S. in Information Science and a B.A. in Politics and Technology (through the interdisciplinary College Scholar program), both from Cornell.
My full CV is available here, and you can contact me via:
Presentations
Eyes, Locks, Patterns: AI and Crime Control in the Retail Workplace
Moradi, Pegah, Karen Levy, Cristobal Cheyre. AI & the Future of Work Conference. Cornell ILR Review, Cornell University. September 2024.
“Please wait, help is on the way": How Self-Checkout Offsets Tasks and Reconstructs Roles for Frontline Retail Workers.
Moradi, Pegah. Joint Meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SEA/SAW), Tufts University. April 2024.
Are There Economic Grounds for Regulating Behavioral Ads?
Moradi, Pegah, Cristobal Cheyre and Alessandro Acquisti. 16th Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference, University of Colorado-Boulder. June 2023.
"A Fountain Pen Come to Life": The Anxieties of the Autopen
Moradi, Pegah and Karen Levy. “Media as SocioTechnical Systems” International Journal of Communication Forum, University of Southern California. April 2023.
AI-Mediated Communication, Legislative Responsiveness, and Trust in Democratic Institutions.
Kreps, Sarah, Pegah Moradi and Maurice Jakesch. “Technologies of Deception” Conference, Information Society Project, Yale Law School. March 2022.
Race, Ethnicity, and the Future of Work.
Moradi, Pegah. Western Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA. March 2018.
Other Writing
I occasionally write essays about topics related and unrelated to my academic research. My personal essays have been featured in The Norton Sampler, 9th ed. and have won awards, such as the Knight Institute Expository Writing prize.
I was previously an opinion columnist for The Cornell Daily Sun, where I wrote about personal identity and campus culture. You can view those articles here. I'm particularly proud of this one—my final column for the Sun.