Severin studies the ethical legitimacy of classification in powerful socio-technical systems such as the Chinese Social Credit System, social media profiling and facial analysis AI. With a background in Philosophy of Technology and Computer Science, his research combines conceptual analysis with quantitative and qualitative methods.

Prior to his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, Severin completed his Ph.D. at the School of Computation, Information and Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He also designed and taught courses in digital ethics at TUM’s Department of Computer Science.

Severin was a visiting scholar at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. His work has been published in cross-disciplinary Computer Science conferences such as Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) and Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES), and it has been covered by media outlets such as TechCrunch.

Email: se373@cornell.edu