Dr. Madeleine I. G. Daepp is the Research Director at CDT, where she studies the challenges and opportunities novel technologies present for global democracies. A civic technologist by training, Madeleine is committed to ensuring AI and other emerging tools solve more problems than they create.
Madeleine is currently on civic leave from Microsoft Research, where she conducted fieldwork on generative propaganda in Taiwan and India, developed methods for red-teaming across language and culture, and documented emerging digital divides in AI interest and use. While at Microsoft, she was a senior researcher on Project Eclipse, a deployment of 100+ low-cost air quality sensors in Chicago that served as the foundation of a data science-driven reporting series by Muckrock, WBEZ Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times and became a case study for the World Bank/USC Annenberg Summer Institute. She has also served as Visiting Director of Civic Innovation at Public Democracy America, where she built a technical and data science team and advised a network of American civil society organizations on navigating the AI transition. Madeleine has written invited perspectives for The Economist and Nature Computational Science, keynoted the European Conference on Information Retrieval, and published in peer-reviewed venues spanning computer science, urban economics, and public health.
Madeleine’s work is characterized by multisectoral and multidisciplinary collaborations that center the people most affected by the problems she studies. She holds a Ph.D. in urban planning from MIT, where she collaborated with Boston residents to visualize common pathways of displacement from consumer credit data, and an M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia – Vancouver, where she worked with public health nutritionists to quantify food advertising environments around Canadian schools. She is a Truman and Udall Scholar (PA 2012), and graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and economics from Washington University in St. Louis.
