Katina’s Brief Biography
Katina Michael is professor of Strategy, Innovation and Technology at the University of Sydney Business School. She is the inaugural program director of the MBA (Technology and Digital Strategy). She is a transdisciplinary scholar who connects technical, policy, and public audiences, raising awareness of socio-technical challenges and how to address them through human-centered design. Katina was the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 2020-2025, and the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 2011-2017.
While she was still doing her PhD, Katina was employed as a pre-sales engineer at a transnational telecommunications vendor, Nortel Networks. She credits her international perspective on the opportunities she was granted between 1996-2001 to work on critical and emerging technologies in many countries that were undergoing deregulation in the telecommunications sector, especially throughout Asia. She learnt first-hand how important new technologies were to traditional brick-and-mortar business and to startups and their strategy.
As a senior member of the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology, and with a cross-disciplinary background in technology, law and business, Katina not only does research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of emerging technology but on how to mitigate risks through better design approaches, technical standards, policies, and regulation that is enforceable. She is an advocate of systemic change through the adoption of new business models, such as public interest technology, that are not solely based on economics, but on principled innovation.
What purpose our socio-technical systems serve, and how sustainable into the long-term they will be, directly will impact the flourishing of people and planet.
Katina’s Topic Abstracts
Topic 1: Online digital services have changed the way that people interact. Companies provide apps for download allowing users of any age to experience them through smartphones and tablets among other devices. To date, company policies have acted as pseudo-guidelines for recommended use. But what happens when apps that were never designed for children are acquired and used by them? To mitigate potential risks the IEEE 2089–2021 standard was developed- an age appropriate digital services framework for children. The standard stipulates the need for a risk-based age appropriate register by which developers can do away with potential intolerable harms on children during the design phase, and keep track of unintended hazards, in order to counteract ongoing negative impacts on children, allowing them to thrive and flourish. Supplementing international law, state regulations, and company policies related to acceptable use, IEEE 2089–2021 provides a benchmark for how children’s apps should be designed based on the 5Rights Principles. Technical standards can be considered a type of soft law, supplementing hard law like treaties or acts, and even non-legally binding instruments like declarations and policies. Together this panoply of safeguards can mitigate the potential for flaws in product development, ranging from data privacy breaches, location tracking default features, nudging toward in-gaming purchases and autoscrolling, child labor toward data annotation, and adverse metaverse experiences. But given the rapidity of product development cycles, it is technical standards that can have the most immediate effect on the pacing problem ensuring that child rights impact assessments (CRIA) are implemented in practice.
Topic 2: Modern artificial intelligence is inherently paradoxical in many ways. While AI aims to increase automation, it also requires more intimate human involvement to reflect on the insights generated (automation paradox). While AI results in job displacement, it also creates new jobs, some simply to provide the necessary support systems for those newly unemployed (transition paradox). And as generative AI takes away control over the creative process, it also offers new creative opportunities (creativity paradox). This article considers another paradox, that relates to the fact that computational systems created using AI can be used both for public good in civilian applications and for harm across a range of application areas and settings. This contradiction is explored within an organizational and governmental context, where modern AI relies on data which might be externally or internally-sourced. External data sources are inclusive of open-source intelligence (OS-INT), such as information available on the Internet and the dark web, and internal data sources may include proprietary data found within an organizational or a wider governmental context. A further relevant consideration is the expanding role of the Internet of Things to support smart infrastructures, which has created new vulnerabilities.
Topic 3: MedTech innovation is increasingly shaped by data-driven systems, AI-enabled decision support, and connected medical devices, raising ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) that directly affect trust, adoption, and scalability. For early-stage startups, these issues are often treated as downstream compliance risks rather than upstream design opportunities. Startups that design for ethics, law, and social impact early, build products that earn trust faster, navigate regulation more smoothly, and scale with fewer downstream risks. This presentation positions the embedding of ELSI into the MedTech design process from the outset as essential for building technologies that are safe, trusted, and investment-ready. Drawing on sociotechnical design, responsible innovation, and health governance perspectives, the presentation frames MedTech products as value-laden systems whose design choices influence accountability, equity, transparency, and patient agency. We propose a practical, design-integrated approach that supports founders in identifying and addressing ethical risks, regulatory expectations, and social context during ideation, prototyping, and iteration. This requires what is known as foresight planning. Key considerations include data stewardship, bias and fairness, explainability, responsibility allocation, and protections for vulnerable users. By shifting ELSI from a compliance checklist to a design capability, the presentation demonstrates how ethics is a driver of product quality, market credibility, and long-term impact, especially for complex MedTech innovations such as biomedical devices.
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