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professional experiences
leadership and engagement publications
conference organizing
teaching
public scholarship
education

Professional Experience

Founder & President | Responsible AI Washington Dec 2025 – Present

• Founded and led an AI policy and governance non-profit, developing programmatic priorities, business strategy, and stakeholder partnerships from the ground up.
• Delivered AI governance briefings to 100+ municipal and county stakeholders across civic assemblies, and drove adoption of responsible AI frameworks at the county level.
• Organized AI policy panels and workshops that connected and coordinated legislative teams, civil rights leaders, researchers, and CTOs to discuss critical policy needs and adoption successes.
• Consulted on AI governance roadmaps and conducted responsible AI reviews for local and state government and community organizations, translating AI risk into practice and policy.

Tenured Associate Professor (Research Program Director) | University of Calgary Aug 2016 – Aug 2025

• Administered a $2M+ portfolio of 12+ research and technology projects, supervising teams of up to 20 analysts and specialists. Delegated, coordinated, and synthesized team work and outputs.
• Led the City of Calgary’s open data modernization initiative, conducting client interviews that shaped platform and policy decisions.
• Co-authored Alberta’s Non-profit Data Strategy, identifying gaps and best practices to steer provincial data sharing policy. Drew on 12 interviews with professionals and policymakers.
• Developed YYC Data Collective, a platform for data sharing among non-profits and community associations, establishing safety and security protocols including authentication, dataset validation, and server configuration, ultimately attracting 300+ datasets.
• Directed “AI for Global Public Health” project (team of 9) in partnership with Seattle non-profit, delivering 4 AI solutions to improve healthcare worker route planning, and better assess program outcomes (2021).

AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow | National Science Foundation (sabbatical from University of Calgary) Sep 2023 – Sep 2024

• Conducted program strategy review to design and implement 4 new federal grant programs and a proposal review framework for the National AI Research Institutes, steering federal research funding toward responsible AI research, use, and development.
• Coordinated 10+ high-profile engagement activities with congressional members and AI Institute leadership, including responsible governance training and conferences.

Tech Governance Research Consultant | Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (concurrent with University of Washington position) Jul 2012 – Jul 2013

• Organized cross-agency federal workshops on data and technology governance for global development, emergency management, and humanitarianism.
• Advised global tech deployment strategy for multinational institutions, including UN OCHA and Google.org.

Research Program Manager | University of Washington Jul 2009 – Jun 2015

• Directed a 6-year ethnographic research program producing field-shaping guidance on technology deployment in global development and humanitarian contexts.
• Led a 5-person cross-functional data science team to build a community well-being data visualization platform using sentiment analysis and automated image analysis for a local nonprofit.

Select Leadership and Engagement

2026 Contributor, Global Council for Responsible AI’s international AI governance framework (“RAISE”).

2026 Expert, Snohomish County Civic Assembly, organized by Civic Genius. Provided knowledge/context for 100+ citizens to democratically advise policymakers on county AI policy.

2026 Interviewee, KUOW Seattle Now podcast episode “How a TikTok fixed a massive language error at the WA DOL”.

2026 Author, “2026 Washington State Legislative Session Priorities”. Published for Responsible AI Washington.

2025 3rd U.S.-Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium. “Session V: Smart and Connected Cities”. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; and the Republic of Rwanda. Kigali, Rwanda.

2023-2025 Member, Generative AI Working Group, National Institute of Standards and Technology.

2023 Contributor, 2024 AI and Democratic Values Index, Center for AI & Digital Policy — led content analysis across multiple countries’ AI policies.

2016-2017 Ethics of Location-Based Technologies in Crisis Workshop. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Washington, DC.

Sample Publications

2025 Burns, Ryan. Don’t Be Fooled: AI Is Only as Human as It Is Trained to Be. The Seattle Times.

2023 Tretter, E., R. Burns. Digital Transformations of the Urban – Carbon – Labor Nexus: A Research Agenda. Digital Geography & Society 5: 1-9.

2023 Burns, R., P. Welker. Interstitiality in the Smart City: Beyond Top-down and Bottom-up Smartness. Urban Studies.

2023 Mackinnon, Debra, R. Burns, V. Fast (Eds.). Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City. University of Toronto Press.

2022 Burns, R., P. Welker. “Make our communities better through data”: The Moral Economy of Smart City Labor. Big Data & Society 9(1).

2021 Mouton, Morgan, R. Burns. (Digital) Neo-colonialism and the Smart City. Regional Studies 55(12): 1890-1901. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.1915974.

2021 Miller, B., K. Ward, R. Burns, V. Fast, A. Levenda. Worlding and Provincialising Smart Cities: From Individual Case Studies to a Global Comparative Research Agenda. Urban Studies. OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020976086.

2020 Burns, Ryan, M. Andrucki. Smart Cities: Who Cares?. Environment & Planning A 53(1): 12-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20941516.

2019 Burns, Ryan, G. Wark. Where’s the Database in Digital Ethnography? Exploring Database Ethnography for Open Data Research. Qualitative Research 20(5): 598-616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794119885040.

2019 Burns, Ryan. New Frontiers of Philanthro-capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism. Antipode 51(4):1101-1122. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12534.

2019 Burns, Ryan, K. Gurung. “Emerging Perspectives on Data Sharing”. Policy white paper for the City of Calgary.

Select conference organizing

2024 Local organizing committee. Society for the Social Study of Science (4S). Seattle, WA.

2023-2024 Organizing committee. Summit for AI Leadership (National Science Foundation). Atlanta, GA, Pittsburgh, PA.

2023 Organizer. Digital Geographic Movements and Methods. University of Calgary.

2018 Organizer. 13th Annual Critical Geographies Mini-conference. University of Calgary.

Select Teaching Experience Summary

2026 (Responsible AI Washington) Multiple seminars on responsible AI

2023-2026 (University of Washington Bothell) GIS

2016-2023 (University of Calgary) Urban GIS, Urban studies, Advanced GIS, Web GIS, geoAI, study abroad (x3)

2015-2016 (Temple University) Web and Mobile GIS; Digital Mapping; Fundamentals of GIS

Recent Community and Public Scholarship

2019-2020 Co-chair, Alberta Non-profit Data Strategy – Data Hubs Task Group. (stewardship of PolicyWise, Edmonton, AB).

2019 Organizer. “Working with Open Data”. Cyber Summit. Kananaskis Country, AB. Co-organized by personal invitation with David Chan and Byron Chu of Cybera.

2018 Inaugural lecture, “Social and Technological Humanitarian Studies” program, University of Calgary. A lecture I organized to report to my department the research I’ve been doing.

2018 Keynote presenter, “Open Data Community of Practice” workshop. City of Calgary, AB.

Education

2015 Ph.D. Geography, University of Washington

2009 M.S. Geographic Information Science, San Diego State University

2006 B.A. Geography (Magna Cum Laude), Eastern Kentucky University