Hello! I'm Julia Barnett and I recently received my PhD in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern Unviersity. TSB is an interdisciplinary PhD program in computer science and communication, and my degree was jointly awarded by both schools. My research interests lie in AI ethics, algorithmic impact, participatory AI policy, generative audio models, reducing the sociotechnical harms of algorithmic systems, and copyright law concerning generative AI.

Right now I'm completeing a 1-year AI/ML research residency at Apple on the Responsible AI team, and I'm based in Cambridge, MA.

At NW I was advised by Nicholas Diakopoulos, and we research different areas in the ethical AI space with a focus on algorithmic impact. We most recently explored a participatory approach to policy making by engaging lay stakeholders to brainstorm and prioritize potential stakeholder action pairs that governments should specify in policy in order to mitigate harms from generative AI. I also work with Bryan Pardo to build an interface that uncovers the influences of generated pieces of music to provide a path for the end-user to move from ignorant appropriator to informed creator. I work with Peter DiCola to build a framework to guide researchers to assist with the information gathering process of the courts in generative AI copyright cases through a case study of past landmark cases in copyright and technological innovation.

I completed a Master's Degree in Data Science at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics in 2019, and I got my Bachelor's Degree in Business Analytics, International Business, and Marketing from Villanova University in 2018. Before my PhD I finished up a two year stint as a Senior Data Scientist at The Washington Post.

July 2026: AI-tribution, our work deploying a tool to allow users to engage with training data attribution information of generative music models, was accepted at AIES 2026! This was a study in my dissertation, and a collaboration with Nathan Pruyne, Nick Diakopoulos, and Bryan Pardo.

July 2026: I started a research residency at Apple on the Responsible AI team. I'm now based in Cambridge, MA.

June 2026: I presented Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventions at FAccT, 2

April 2026: I successfully defended my PhD!!! 🎓🎓🎓 My dissertation is titled "Lay Stakeholder Centric Sociotechnical Mechanisms for Addressing the Impacts of Generative AI," and spans three research areas: generative music, participatory policy, and the intersection of copyright law and generative AI.

April 2026: Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventions was accepted at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) 2026! This is a continued collaboration with Kimon Kieslich, Natali Helberger, and Nick Diakopoulos.

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December 2025: Presented "Ethics Statements in AI Music Papers: The Effective and the Ineffective" at the inaugural AI4Music Workshop at NeurIPS, a project I led with collaborators at the Interactive Audio Lab at Northwestern.

October 2025: Presented three papers at AIES (AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society) in Madrid. Presented an SLR on Scenario Building in Computing Literature, Sound Check: Auditing Recent Audio Dataset Practices, and an early account of my dissertation work.

October 2025: Gave a talk at the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona presenting work on how to map, measure, and manage harms created by and surrounding use of generative music models.

September 2025: I successfully defended my prospectus, entitled "Lay stakeholder centric sociotechnical mechanisms for addressing the impacts of generative AI". Officially ABD!! 🥳

July 2025: I had two works accepted to AIES 2025! One was a first authored Systematic Literature Review on Scenario Building together with Kimon Kieslich, Jasmine Sinchai, and Nick Diakopoulos, and another wider collaboration with audio ethics researchers titled "Sound Check: Auditing Recent Audio Dataset Practices" led by William Agnew. 📖💻 & 🎤🎵🎧

June 2025: "The Rhythm In Anything (TRIA): Audio-prompted Drums generation with masked language modeling," a collaboration led by Patrick O'Reilly, got accepted at ISMIR 2025! 🎵🥁

April 2025: Envisioning Stakeholder-Action Pairs to Mitigate Negative Impacts of AI: A Participatory Approach to Inform Policy Making, a joint work with Kimon Kieslich, Natali Helberger, and Nick Diakopoulos, got accepted at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) for this summer's proceedings. 👭🏛️👫

February 2025: Wrote a blog post exploring the overlooked water footprint of AI models which was published on the Generative AI in the Newsroom blog. 🤖♻️💧

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December 2024: Text2FX: Harnessing CLAP Embeddings for Text-Guided Audio Effects, a joint work with Annie Chu, Patrick O'Reilly, and Bryan Pardo, got accepted at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). [PDF] 💬 ➡ 🔊

November 2024: Presented "Exploring Musical Roots: Applying Audio Embeddings to Empower Influence Attribution for a Generative Music Model" at the 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). [PDF] [Video] 🎵🤖

October 2024: Presented "Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation" at the 7th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES). [PDF] 📝🤖

September 2024: Finished a trilogy of blog posts explaining the current landscape of the generative AI and copyright lawsuits with definitions and background (post 1), historical precedent (post 2), and the current cases and future trajectory (post 3). 👩🏻‍⚖️

September 2024: I finished all my qualifying exams. Officially a PhD Candidate! 🥳

July 2024: My paper "Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation" with Kimon Kieslich and Nick Diakopoulos got accepted at the 7th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES). [PDF] 📝🤖

July 2024: My fist post of a series, Decoding US Copyright Law and Fair Use for Generative AI Legal Cases, was published in the Generative AI in the Newsroom blog 👩🏻‍⚖️

June 2024: My paper "Exploring Musical Roots: Applying Audio Embeddings to Empower Influence Attribution for a Generative Music Model" with Bryan Pardo and Hugo Flores García got accepted at the 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR).

April-June 2024: Helped teach a course on introduction to law and digital technologies at Northwestern 👩🏻‍⚖️

March-April 2024: Taught a seminar at Skokie Public Library on the Ethics of Generative AI in the Media 📚

February 2024: Successfully defended my computer science qualifying exam! 🥳

January 2024: Released a pre-print for new work: Exploring Musical Roots: Applying Audio Embeddings to Empower Influence Attribution for a Generative Music Model

January 2024: Presented recent work on exploring musical roots: empowering influence attribution for generative music models at Northwestern's "Human-centered AI and Music: A One-day Symposium on the Design and Implications of Generative Models in Music." 🎵🤖

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September 2023: Attended and did a poster presentation at the Chicago Human+AI Lab (CHAI)'s Symposium on Human+AI.

August 2023: Presented my paper on  The Ethical Implications of Generative Audio Models: A Systematic Literature Review at Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2023 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

August 2023: My work on the ethical implications of generative audio models was featured in the Montreal AI Ethics Institute blog.

June 2023: Presented on joint work with Orsolya Vásárhelyi, Ágnes Horvát, and Stasa Milojevic about intersectional inequalities in the success of scientific publication at the International Conference on Science of Science and Innovation at Northwestern University in Evanston.

June 2023: Finished all my coursework! 🤠