Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo

• Faculty Affiliate, Informatics
• Faculty Affiliate, Center for Global Studies
• Faculty Affiliate, Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences

Governance in sociotechnical systems as designed, practiced, and experienced; evaluating technology governance outcomes; social inequality in experiences with technology; information law, policy, and inequality; social aspects of privacy, data, platforms, and personalization; and social informatics.

• Public Voices Fellow, 2023-2024
• OpEd Alumni Project, 2024-2025

Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research empirically explores governance of sociotechnical systems. Using mixed-methods, including computational social science approaches and institutional analysis, she addresses research questions about: participation in and legitimacy of sociotechnical governance; alignment between sociotechnical governance and public interest; privacy, misinformation, and social outcomes in sociotechnical systems; and differences between policies or regulations and sociotechnical practice. Her work practically supports decision-making in, management of, and participation in a diverse public sphere. She is an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, co-PI of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons, and series editor for Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons.
 
Prior to joining the iSchool, Sanfilippo studied environmental studies, international studies, political science, and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (BS) and information science at Indiana University, Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing (MIS, PhD). She then held postdoctoral fellowships at the Information Law Institute at New York University's School of Law and the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University, with affiliations with AI Now and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

Wilfley, M., Ai, M., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2026). Competing visions of ethical AI: a case study of OpenAI. Information Research an international electronic journal, 31(iConf), 684-698.

Ugwuoke, V., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2025). The current landscape of deepfake legislation in the United States: Analysis of state-level responses. Journal of Information Policy, 15, 97-129.

Uba, E. E., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2025). Governing knowledge commons in information science. Information Research an international electronic journal, 30(iConf), 548-555.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Ocepek, M. G. (2025). Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons. United States: Cambridge University Press.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Zhu, X. A., & Yang, S. (2025). Sociotechnical governance of misinformation: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 76(1), 289-325.

Choksi, M. Z., Ali, A. F., Shvartzshnaider, Y., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2024). Student Privacy Activism: Protesting Radical Digital Transformation in EdTech. Journal of Information Policy, 14.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Apthorpe, N., Brehm, K., & Shvartzshnaider, Y. (2023). Privacy governance not included: analysis of third parties in learning management systems. Information and Learning Sciences, 124(9/10), 326-348.

Frischmann, B. M., Madison, M. J., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (Eds.). (2023). Governing smart cities as knowledge commons. Cambridge University Press.

Sanfilippo, M. R., & Frischmann, B. (2023). Slow-governance in smart cities: An empirical study of smart intersection implementation in four US college towns. Volume 12, Issue 1.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Frischmann, B., & Strandburg, K. J. (eds.) (2021). Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons. Cambridge University Press.

Kaushik, S., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2026). Governing Manipulative and Synthetic Content on Social Media Platforms. HICSS-59, January 6-9, 2026.

Zhou, K. Z., Chen, J. E., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2025). A Comprehensive Institutional Analysis of Software Accessibility Laws. In 53rd Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy (TPRC).

Silva, E.B.R., Kilhoffer, Z., Oh, S.H., & Sanfilippo, M.R. (2025). Critically Comparing Global AI Regulations. Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. HICSS-58, January 7 – 10, 2025.

Oh, S.H., & Sanfilippo, M.R. (2024). University Governance for Responsible AI. In the Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference, October 14-17, 2024.

Zhou, K.Z., & Sanfilippo, M.R. (2024). Understanding People’s Contextual Choices of Differential Privacy. TPRC52.

Tharp, A., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2024). Contextually Normative Governance of Body-Cam Data. Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), May 30-31, 2024.

Abrams, K. M., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2023, May). Governance Conflicts and Public Court Records. In International Conference on Computer Ethics (Vol. 1, No. 1).

Sanfilippo, M. R., Choksi, M. Z., Hinchliffe, L. J., Mulligan, D., & Wood, S. (2022). Innovative Privacy Practices. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 601-604.

Yang, S., Sanfilippo, M., Fichman, P., Zhang, S., Zhu, A., & Fleischmann, K.R. (2020) The Use of ICT During a Global Health Crisis. 2020 ASIS&T.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Shvartzshnaider, Y., Reyes, I., Nissenbaum, H., & Egelman, S. (2020). Disaster Privacy/Privacy Disaster. PrivacyCon, FTC, July 21, 2020.