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Alumni-Faculty Forum — AI and Human Value: Creativity, Ownership and the Future of Work

Saturday, May 23 @ 10:30 am - 11:45 am
McCosh Hall, Room 10
Princeton University Alumni-Faculty Forum

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Moderator:

Steven A. Kelts
Lead, Integrated Ethics in Computer Science; Lecturer, Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Computer Science; Professional Specialist, Center for Information Technology

 

Panelists:     

Dina Nayeri ’01
Faculty Member, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Blake Parsons ’11 
Lead Product Manager, DoorDash AI Support

Eno Reyes ’21 
Chief Technology Officer, Factory

Robert Gordon III *89 
Senior Strategic Leader, AI and Digital Innovation, DSS, Inc.


MODERATOR

Steven A. Kelts
Steven Kelts runs the Integrated Ethics in Computer Science initiative, working with future programmers to embed responsible practices into their work habits. He has been an ethics adviser to the Responsible A.I. Institute and a director of the nonprofit All Tech Is Human. His recent research focuses on two things: the measurement of effective ethics teaching for computing students; and the potential for ethical action in today’s tech firms. Along with a team from Princeton’s Department of Psychology, he won the National Ethics Education Research Award for a recent study of his tech-ethics students. He is the recipient of two grants from Princeton’s Center on Science and Technology for a program called “Agile Ethics,” and of a University-wide award for his leadership of the GradFUTURES initiative on Ethics of AI.

PANELISTS

Dina Nayeri ’01
Dina Nayeri’s acclaimed books, essays and stories are published in more than 20 countries and taught in schools across Europe and the U.S. “Who Gets Believed?” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. “The Ungrateful Refugee” was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won Germany’s Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. The Observer called it “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.” A former fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and winner of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Nayeri has written essays and stories that have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, “Best American Short Stories” and many other publications. A graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard Business School and Princeton, Nayeri is a reader at the University of St. Andrews. 

Blake Parsons ’11
Blake Parsons is a product leader building AI-powered customer support across chat and voice at DoorDash. His current focus is improving AI agent performance with the goal of replacing Tier 1 support while maintaining strong customer outcomes. Previously, he was director of product management at BirchAI (acquired), leading generative AI products for enterprise healthcare, and earlier helped build Uber Eats ads and led driver growth and operations products at Uber. He began his career in strategy and operations consulting at Bain & Company. Parsons earned a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton and a Master of Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He represented both universities as a varsity heavyweight rower. Outside of work, he is an AI tinkerer, aspiring mechanic and occasional chef, and the father of a 2-year-old.

Eno Reyes ’21
Eno Reyes is co-founder and CTO of Factory, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup building an enterprise platform to enable, deploy and measure the impact of frontier software development agents called Droids. His interests span cognitive science, computer science and artificial intelligence. Previously, he was a research engineer at Hugging Face and a software engineer at Microsoft. Reyes was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 North America list in artificial intelligence.

Robert Gordon III *89
Robert Gordon is the senior AI strategist of Document Storage Systems, Inc., an information technology and software development company focused on veterans health. A graduate of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Gordon serves as a board member, secretary and governance chair of Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). He is a former deputy under secretary of defense for military community and family policy in the Pentagon, and former president of Be the Change Inc. His 26-year military career included overseeing the American Politics program as an academy professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service, SPIA’s Edward P. Bullard Distinguished Alumnus Award and the National Conference on Citizenship’s Franklin Award.

 

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Speakers
Moderated by Steven A Kelts; Panelists: Dina Nayeri ’01, Faculty Member, University of St. Andrews, Scotland; Blake Parsons ’11, Lead Product Manager, DoorDash AI Support; Eno Reyes ’21, Chief Technology Officer, Factory; Robert Gordon III *89, Senior Strategic Leader, AI and Digital Innovation, DSS, Inc
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