David Watson is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, where his research focuses on the epistemological foundations of machine learning. His interests fall at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and sociology. He has written on a wide variety of topics, including quantum cosmology, crowdsourcing in the natural sciences, and efficient algorithms for unsupervised cluster detection. His most recent work concerns normative approaches to artificial intelligence research, with an emphasis on promoting open source analytics.

David received his MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute in 2015, studying under the supervision of Prof. Luciano Floridi. He went on to become a Data Scientist at Queen Mary University’s Centre for Translational Bioinformatics, where his responsibilities included identifying disease subtypes using high-throughput sequencing technologies and integrating multi-omic data for numerous stratified medicine projects. In addition to his academic work, David is a regular contributor to The Economist, where he writes articles and builds models for the Graphic Detail and Game Theory blogs.