Karen Levy

Timeline

1. 2003–2014

   Indiana and Princeton degrees

   She earns a B.A. in political science at Indiana University in 2003 and a J.D. there in 2006. She completes an M.A. in sociology at Princeton in 2010 and a sociology Ph.D. there in 2014.

2. 2006–2016

   A clerkship and NYU postdoc

   She clerks at the U.S. District Court in Indianapolis from 2006 to 2008. From 2014 to 2016, she works as a postdoc at NYU's Information Law Institute and as a fellow at Data and Society Research Institute.

3. 2015–2016

   Joining Cornell Information Science

   She becomes an assistant professor of information science at Cornell in its 2015–16 faculty class, researching surveillance, data collection and how rules interact with technologies. In 2015, she publishes “The Contexts of Control: Information, Power, and Truck Driving Work.”

4. 2022

   Data Driven and trucker surveillance

   In 2022, she publishes Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance with Princeton University Press. The book examines how digital surveillance changes trucking and raises questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.

5. 2023

   The CITAMS Best Book Award

   In August 2023, Data Driven receives the American Sociological Association's Best Book Award from its Section on Communications, Information Technology, and Media Sociology.

6. 2024

   Participatory foundation models

   In 2024, she coauthors “Participation in the age of foundation models,” which proposes a layered blueprint for community participation in the design and use of foundation models. The paper illustrates the approach through case studies in clinical care, financial services and journalism.

7. 2025

   AI rules in federal grants

   In 2025, she coauthors “One Bad NOFO? AI Governance in Federal Grantmaking,” which studies how federal agencies use grant notices to govern grantee AI. The authors find few AI-specific judging criteria or restrictions in opportunities that mention AI.

8. 2026

   Automating baseball's strike zone

   In 2026, she coauthors “Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement,” a study of MLB's automated system. It traces the gap between the written strike-zone rule and the system's implementation, then calls for evaluation of how people experience such systems in practice.

9. As of October 2026

   Co-leading Cornell AIPP

   In October 2025, she joins a Cornell Law School panel on data access and AI explainability as an associate professor of information science. As of October 2026, she is an associate professor at Cornell and one of four faculty leaders of its AIPP initiative; her work studies how digital technologies enforce rules and normalize electronic surveillance within social and organizational relationships. In June 2026, she discusses how purpose-built LLMs could affect summer-associate work and legal training.