Olya’s current work concerns AI and democracy in different contexts. Predominantly, her research orbits the AI DeMoS Lab where she supervises PhD projects on (1) the interrelation of synthetic media and trust, (2) political subjectivity and social media, (3) digital phenotyping in the mental healthcare, (4) critical engagement with AI systems in the public sphere, and (5) development of Adversarial Machine Learning systems to facilitate private deliberation online. Olya is also co-supervising responsible AI development projects in large consortia, such as the Dutch National ELSA Lab AI MAPS (with the Dutch police) and the EUR-Erasmus MC-TU Delft Convergence Flagship project ProtectME (on AI and mental wellbeing of adolescents).
Olya is an interdisciplinary researcher. Philosophically, her work is inspired by (post)phenomenology, Dewey’s pragmatism and bioethics. She is interested in understanding the technologically induced value change and connecting the insights to the developmental practices.
To this end, she experiments with a range of empirical methods from STS and psychology (e.g. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis), integrating them in philosophy of technology (e.g. Value Sensitive Design). At the moment, she is conducting an international survey on the impact of Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, on the value of education. Olya’s research on ChatGPT has been featured several times on Dutch national television and radio, as well as international popular technology magazines, such as WIRED.
In all of her work, Olya adopts a perspective of technologies as sociotechnical systems, where the ethical dimension arises not only within separate human, technological or institutional-cultural component, but also at their intersection. To anticipate the ethical challenges and opportunities for an informed design and use of technologies, Olya thinks it is essential to combine different academic practices and fields. At the moment (2023), Olya supervises 8 PhD projects and a visiting researcher from the Fulbright program.
