Welcome Dr. Eddie Yang!

The Department is delighted to welcome Assistant Professor Eddie Yang to the faculty! Dr. Yang recently completed his PhD at University of California San Diego holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Center for Science of Innovation where he is working on projects that explore how policies and political institutions shape technological innovation.  On one project, he is evaluating the impact of industrial policies on the semiconductor industry and how to use AI to facilitate policy-relevant research. 

He and co-authors recently published “The Impact of U.S.-China Tensions on U.S. Science" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We find that U.S.-China tensions negatively affected the productivity of U.S. scientists in life sciences and decreased scientific collaboration between the U.S. and China.   

When asked about what motivated him to join Purdue, Dr. Yang noted “As a scholar of technology, Purdue is an exciting place to be because it has a great group of faculty who work on innovation and technology. Purdue is also one of the few universities where I can get a pilot certificate.”  

Hired as part of a growing cluster of AI scholars in the Department and College of Liberal Arts, Dr. Yang brings interesting new perspectives on how AI and politics intersect in authoritarian regimes.  In his dissertation and related articles, he explores how censorship and propaganda by authoritarian governments shapes training data used by AI. He utilizes multiple methods to explore the political biases of AI including audit studies and lab-in-the-field experiments.  

Learn more about Dr. Eddie Yang and his research at his research webpage.