Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo

Assistant Professor

PhD, Information Science, Indiana University

Other professional appointments

  • Faculty Affiliate, Informatics
  • Faculty Affiliate, Center for Global Studies

Research focus

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.

Honors and Awards

  • Public Voices Fellow, 2023-2024

Biography

Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research empirically explores governance of sociotechnical systems, as well as outcomes, inequality, and consequences within these systems. Using mixed-methods, including computational social science approaches and institutional analysis, she addresses research questions about: participation in and legitimacy of sociotechnical governance; social justice issues associated with sociotechnical governance; privacy 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 a 2023-2024 Public Voices Fellow, 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.

Publications & Papers

Sanfilippo, M.R., Zhu, X.A., & Yang, S. (2024). Sociotechnical Governance of Misinformation. The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST).

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., & Liu, C. (2023). Governing Privacy as Contexts Overlap during Crisis. In Fichman, Zhang, and Zhu (eds.), The Usage and Impact of ICTs during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Routledge.

Madison, M. J., Frischmann, B. M., Sanfilippo, M. R., & Strandburg, K. J. (2022). Too much of a good thing? A governing knowledge commons review of abundance in context. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 7, 959505.

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

Sanfilippo, M. R., & Shvartzshnaider, Y. (2021). Data and Privacy in a Quasi-Public Space: Disney World as a Smart City. In iConference 2021 Proceedings.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Shvartzshnaider, Y., Reyes, I., Nissenbaum, H., & Egelman, S. (2020). Disaster privacy/privacy disaster. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Presentations

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).

Blake, C., Sanfilippo, M., Sivan-Sevilla, I., Bashir, M., & Vazquez, G. (2022). Leveraging Sociotechnical Systems to Empower the Communities We Serve. SIGSI & SIGIEP Symposoim, ASIS&T 2022 Annual Meeting.

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.

Sanfilippo, M. R., & Chattopadhyay, T. (2021). Sociotechnical Cooperatives: The Impact of Technology on Cooperative Organizations. TPRC48.

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.