What Cornell Digital Life Initiative does
Cornell Digital Life Initiative (DLI) is an academic research and convening program at Cornell Tech (Roosevelt Island, New York City) focused on societal perspectives on digital technology—particularly ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life. DLI frames digital systems as “socio-technical systems” and supports collaborative research that connects technical work with normative questions about justice, democracy, privacy, responsibility, security, and freedom. The initiative also operates a public-facing Digital Life Seminar series, a research-and-publication pipeline via “Reflections” posts, and an outreach mechanism through the weekly Good Code podcast.
Structurally, DLI centers faculty direction (Helen Nissenbaum) while also hosting a dedicated law-and-technology research lab component under the CTRL-ALT program. This lab treats law and computer science as equally important disciplines for studying what happens when legal codes meet machine code, emphasizing areas such as platform governance and content moderation and embedding rule-of-law values into computer systems. Through visiting fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships, DLI brings in researchers across disciplines (including law, computer/information science, and social sciences) to carry forward its ethics- and policy-oriented agenda.