Paula Helm is an Assistant Professor in the fields of Critical AI Studies and Empirical Ethics. Her work is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, and Ethics. The larger goal and mission of her work is to move AI-Ethics from the PR- to the Engineering- and Development-Level. To this end, she is collaborating with partners from Computer Science as well as NGOs and Cultural Associations, combining critical co-creation approaches with empirical ethics, while maintaining a reflective STS-lens.

Additionally, she is the co-leader of the Empirical Ethics Research Group at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Studies and co-coordinates a new Media Studies MA-track on Cultural Data & AI. She is also running an explorative research project on Digital Transformation in the Amazon Assemblage. Apart from teaching and research, she is serving as a member of the UvA Ethics Committee.

Before coming to Amsterdam, she was a research associate at the MCTS at Technical University Munich and the International Center for Ethics in Science at Tübingen University, where she was co-leading several national and EU-projects concerned with the creation and ethical advancement of AI-Systems in various domains.