Sun selected as 2024 PTC Emerging Scholar

Meicen Sun
Meicen Sun, Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor Meicen Sun was selected as a 2024 Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Emerging Scholar and presented her research at the PTC Annual Conference, which was held from January 21-24 in Honolulu, Hawaii. PTC is a global, nonprofit organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Pacific Rim. The Emerging Scholar Program recognizes exceptional, rising scholars in the field of ICT.

In her talk, "Three Worlds of Power in Cyberspace," Sun discussed her research on the sovereign state's control of its Internet infrastructure, such as the regulation of service providers. According to Sun, findings show that neither democracy nor economic development accounts for the variation across states in cyberspace control. This suggests the presence of important new variables that may explain, among other things, the persistent tension among democracies over Internet governance and digital sovereignty, she said.

Sun's research examines the political economy of information, the geopolitics of data, and information policy. Her writings have appeared in several academic and policy outlets, including Foreign Policy Analysis, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum, the Asian Development Bank Institute, and The Diplomat. Sun holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is an affiliated faculty with MIT FutureTech.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Wei receives Amazon Post Internship Fellowship

PhD student Tianxin Wei has been awarded an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship, which will provide $20,000 in unrestricted funds and $20,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to support Wei's research with his advisor, Professor Jingrui He. For the past two summers, Wei has served as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He has been part of a team that is working on search query understanding within Amazon apps and services, as well as developing shopping foundation models.

Tianxin Wei

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."

Carboni joins the iSchool faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nicola Carboni has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in digital humanities at the University of Geneva.

Nicola Carboni

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Chan to present "Predatory Data" work at named lectures

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anita Say Chan