Pegah Moradi 🤖

Pegah wearing a colorful jacket in front of a blurred urban background

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.

My dissertation focuses on how self-checkout machines and other kinds of retail automation 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.

I am an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a 2024-2025 Siegel Family Endowment Research Fellow. My work is also supported by Microsoft Research and the MacArthur Foundation through the Cornell Artificial Intelligence, Policy, and Practice Initiative.

I previously held research fellowships at the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, the Harvard Data Privacy Lab, and Georgetown S2ERC. 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. You can also connect with me at:

Publications

“Are There Economic Grounds for Regulating Behavioral Ads?”
Moradi, Pegah, Cristobal Cheyre, and Alessandro Acquisti. Forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 2025.

"Million Eyes on the 'Robot Umps': The Case for Studying Sports in HRI Through Baseball”
Kamino, Waki, Andrea W Wen-Yi,...,Pegah Moradi,..., Karen Levy, and Malte Jung. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)., 2025.

“Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work.”
Moradi, Pegah, Karen Levy, and Cristobal Cheyre. Proceedings of the ACM: Human Computer Interaction (CSCW), 2025.

"A Fountain Pen Come to Life": The Anxieties of the Autopen.
Moradi, Pegah, and Karen Levy. International Journal of Communication, vol. 18: Forum 1-20. 2024.

The Future of Work in the Age of AI: Displacement or Risk-Shifting?
Moradi, Pegah, and Karen Levy. Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI. 2020.

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.