I joined Imperial College in March 2023 and am now an Associate Professor in Science Communication and Course Director of the MSc in Science Communication. My research focuses on the stories we tell about science and technology across cultures, and how they help us think about ethics and bias in new technologies.

I have a humanities background, unlike most of my colleagues, both within the Science Communication Unit and at Imperial more broadly: I have undergraduate degrees in Film & Literary Studies and English Language & Culture, a Master's in Literary Studies, and a DPhil in English. But that is not the full story: my Master's dissertation was on science books for children, and my DPhil thesis was on the communication of conflicting interpretations of quantum physics to adults and children. My work intersects the fields of science communication, literature and science, and science fiction.

After my PhD, I spent five years as a postdoc and then senior researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, where I am now an Associate Fellow.

I have advised organizations including the World Economic Forum, the UK House of Lords, the G20, and the United Nations on portrayals and perceptions of AI. I have also been an invited speaker for national and international events, and a frequent interviewee for newspapers, radio, and TV.

Teaching


I am the Course Director of the MSc in Science Communication and also teach on the MSc in Science Media Production. My teaching for the upcoming academic year is as follows:

Science and its Social Contexts
Ethics
Group projects
Dissertations
I am also available for supervising PhD students. If you are thinking of applying to do a PhD with me, please get in touch.

Selected Publications


Books:
Cave, S., & Dihal, K., ed. (May 2023) Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press (in press).

Cave, S., Dihal, K. & Dillon, S., ed. (2020) AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198846666.

Dihal, K., ed. (October 2019) Perspectives on Evil: From Banality to Genocide. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-36582-7.

Journal articles and book chapters:
Cave, S., Dihal, K., Drage, E., & McInerney, K. (Aug 2023) Shuri in the Sea of Dudes: the Cultural Construction of the AI Engineer in Popular Film, 1920-2020. In Browne, J., Cave, S., Drage, E., & McInerney, K. (eds.) Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press (in press).

Cave, S., Dihal, K., Drage, E., & McInerney, K. (Feb 2023) Who makes AI? Gender and portrayals of AI scientists in popular film, 1920–2020. Public Understanding of Science. SAGE Publications Ltd: 09636625231153985. DOI: 10.1177/09636625231153985.

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2021) Roxanne, or Companion Robots and Hierarchies of the Human, in The Love Makers, ed. Campbell, A. London: Goldsmiths Press, pp. 225-232.

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2021) Race and AI: The Diversity Dilemma. Philosophy & Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00486-z.

Dihal, K. (2021) Rudy Rucker. In Frana, P. & Klein, M., ed. Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence: The Past, Present, and Future of AI. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 287-289.

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2020) The Whiteness of AI. Philosophy and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6.

Dihal, K. (2020) Enslaved Minds: Fictional Artificial Intelligence Uprisings. In AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, ed. Cave, S., Dihal, K., & Dillon, S. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 189-212.

Cave, S., Coughlan, K., and Dihal, K. (2019) “Scary Robots”: Examining Public Responses to AI. Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society: 331-337. https://doi.org/10.1145/3306618.3314232

Dihal, K. (2019) New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction. In Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities, eds. Engelhardt, N. & Hoydis, J. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1

Cave, S. & Dihal, K. (2019) Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. Nature Machine Intelligence 1(2): 74-78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0020-9