Shauna Concannon

Shauna Concannon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, specializing in Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics. Her research focuses on the societal and ethical implications of emerging technologies, particularly in natural language processing (NLP), dialogue systems, and AI bias mitigation. She holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Universities of Cambridge, York, and Newcastle. Her work emphasizes participatory design, feminist approaches to data science, and equitable technology development.

Shauna’s academic journey began with a master’s in modernist literature from the University of Oxford, followed by interdisciplinary training in computational linguistics. She explores how technologies mediate human interaction, including studies on harmful biases in AI systems and the linguistic encoding of societal values. Her recent projects address ethical AI in storytelling, empathy measurement in dialogue systems, and public engagement with open data through personalized narratives.

• Education:
  • PhD in Computational Linguistics (Queen Mary University of London)
  • Masters in Modernist Literature (University of Oxford)
• Key Research Themes:
  • Ethical AI and algorithmic bias
  • Social impact of conversational AI
  • Feminist data science methodologies
  • Public participation in technology governance

Her publications span computational social science, digital humanities, and human-computer interaction, with notable contributions to frameworks for responsible AI in nonprofit contexts and analysis of pandemic-era science communication. Shauna currently advises four postgraduate students exploring topics like bias reduction in machine translation and ethical design for children’s conversational AI.