News
2026 FAIR Symposium Summary
AI Research Fellows Seek Solutions for Challenges to Privacy, Relevancy and Trust in Machine Learning
The University of Virginia LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business held the second annual Fellowships in AI Research (FAIR) Symposium at The Forum Hotel on 30 January 2026.
The symposium kicked off with a welcome from Yael Grushka-Cockayne, co-academic director of the LaCross AI Institute, and featured presentations from three fellowship teams as well as the announcement of 2026 fellowship recipients.
The FAIR Program serves as a vehicle for the LaCross AI Institute to pursue and support collaboration in ethical AI research across multiple disciplines with awards of up to $100,000 given annually for two-year fellowships. It’s the multi-disciplinary nature of the program that serves as its hallmark. The first cycle of the program (2023-24) was administered by a collaborative formed between Darden and the UVA School of Data Science and has been subsequently managed by the LaCross AI Institute at Darden.
The symposium concluded with the announcement of the 2026 FAIR cohort by Marc Ruggiano, director of the LaCross AI Institute, and Raj Venkatesan, co-academic director of the LaCross AI Institute. Venkatesan noted that this year’s cohort was remarkably challenging for the committee to select due to the variety and depth of submissions which represented five schools of the University. It was a competitive field with 15 submissions and three awards given as detailed below.
Learn more about the FAIR Program
2026 Fellowship in AI Research Recipients
“AI and Managerial Moral Responsibility”
The project proposes to assemble a research team from across the University of Virginia to examine the moral foundations of human-AI interaction and the implications of this examination for the management of organizations.
Robert A. Phillips - Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics, UVA Darden School of Business
David Danks - Polk JSF Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, AI & Data Science, UVA School of Data Science
Student Fellows: Skyler Clark-Hamel (UVA Darden Ph.D. Candidate) and Jack Becker (UVA Darden Ph.D. Student)
“LLM-Enabled Abuse in Digital Advertising: Mapping Malicious Services and Trigger–Tag Mitigation for Ethical AI in Business”
The project will systematically map how malicious LLM services are used within advertising and marketplace workflows and quantify their impact on key platform and advertiser metrics (e.g., conversion rates, click attribution, and complaint rates). Building on these measurements, the team will design and evaluate a mitigation pipeline that defensively fine-tunes LLMs.
Tianhao Wang - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UVA College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Michael Albert – Assistant Professor Business Administration, UVA Darden School of Business
Jingjing Li - Andersen Alumni Associate Professor of Commerce, UVA McIntire School of Commerce
“Designing Radiology AI for Enhanced Human + AI Performance”
Recent evidence shows that AI assistance improves performance for some radiologists while worsening it for others. This project aims to design, test, and evaluate AI-assisted radiology reporting systems that reliably enhance human+AI performance.
Nur Yildirim, Assistant Professor of Data Science, UVA School of Data Science
Luca Cian, Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Business Administration, UVA Darden School of Business
Christopher Gaskin, M.D., Chief Medical Imaging Information Officer, Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging, UVA Health