Fellows
Founding Fellows of the Erpenbach Institute (2026)
Laura McGillicuddy und Swapnil Gaikwad wurden als Founding Fellows der ersten Fellowship-Kohorte des Erpenbach Institute ausgewählt.
Ihre unabhängigen Beiträge antworten auf eine gemeinsame Frage:
Can something appear unchanged and yet fundamentally change?
Aus zwei verschiedenen Praxisfeldern kommend, behandeln beide Beiträge, wie sichtbare Kontinuität grundlegende Verschiebungen von Autorität, Identität und Verantwortung verdecken kann.
The Human in Control: How AI Can Relocate Judgement While Responsibility Appears Unchanged
Laura McGillicuddy is an AI governance and human–AI interaction researcher based in Northern Ireland. She holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Queen's University Belfast, an MA in Psychological Studies from the University of Glasgow, and a BSc in Computer Science from Ulster University. Her work examines how AI systems shape human judgement, trust, agency and accountability, combining technical model evaluation with psychology, responsible AI and twelve years of production automation experience. She is also a NeurIPS 2026 Ethics Reviewer and writes on AI ethics, governance and sociotechnical change.
What should happen at the boundary of what a record can prove
Swapnil Gaikwad works on verification and accountability infrastructure for AI systems. He holds a Master of Science in Data Science from the University of Western Australia, where he was awarded the Global Excellence Scholarship and received a distinction for work on spiking neural networks for acoustic traffic monitoring. He is the sole engineer behind Helmric, a verification layer that checks AI output against declared source material using a fixed entailment classifier rather than a generative model, and produces cryptographically signed records an outside party can verify independently and offline. His research concerns the boundary between what a record can prove and what is actually the case, and the conditions under which a record counts as evidence about a system rather than output from it. He is based in Perth, Western Australia.