Skip to content

HKU IDS Scholar

Dr Boris BABIC
Associate Professor
HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science and
Department of Philosophy, HKU
Associate Professor (by courtesy)
Faculty of Law, HKU 
About Me

Dr Boris Babic is HKU-100 Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, jointly appointed in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science, the Department of Philosophy, and (by courtesy) the Faculty of Law, from Fall 2023. He also serves as an occasional visiting professor in the Decision Sciences department at INSEAD

Dr Babic received a JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Philosophy, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also practiced law at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP in Los Angeles, USA. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Dr Babic’s primary research interests are in Bayesian inference and decision-making, ethics, law, and policy of artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially in medical applications. His research has been published extensively in leading journals such as ScienceNature Machine IntelligenceNature Digital Medicine, and the Harvard Business Review

Dr Babic will be on leave from the University of Toronto, where he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Philosophy and a faculty fellow of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society.

Selected Publications
  1. Boris Babic, and I. Glenn Cohen. “The Algorithmic Explainability Bait and Switch”, Minnesota Law Review. View PDF (2023)
  2. Boris Babic, and Zoe Johnson King. “Algorithmic Fairness and Resentment”, Philosophical Studies. View PDF. (2023)
  3. I. Glenn Cohen, Boris Babic, Sara Gerke, Qiong Xia, Theodoros Evgeniou, and Klaus Wertenbroch. “Appealing AI”, Nature Digital Medicine. View PDF. (2023)
  4. Boris Babic, and Zoe Johnson King. “Moral Encroachment Under Moral Uncertainty”, Philosophers’ Imprint. View PDF. (2023)  
  5. Boris Babic (edited by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb). “Comment on Ariel Dora Stern’s Regulation of Medical AI”, The Economics of Artificial Intelligence. View PDF. (2023) 
  6. Boris Babic, I. Glenn Cohen, Theodoros Evgeniou and Sara Gerke Beware. “Explanations from AI in Health Care”, Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg1834 (2021)
  7. Boris Babic, I. Glenn Cohen, Theodoros Evgeniou and Sara Gerke. “Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Medical Machine Learning”, Nature Machine Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00331-0 (2021)
  8. Boris Babic, Anil Gaba, Ilia Tsetlin, and Robert L. Winkler. “Normativity, Epistemic Rationality and Noisy Statistical Evidence”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715196 (2021)
  9. Boris Babic. “Approximate Coherentism and Luck”, Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/713905 (2021) 
  10. Boris Babic, I. Glenn Cohen, Theodoros Evgeniou, and Sara Gerke. “A System View for Medical ML Policy”, Nature Digital Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-0262-2 (2020)

Research Interests

Bayesian Statistics; Ethics, Law and Policy of AI and Machine Learning; Decision & Game Theory; Legal Theory