// About
Hi there. I am a researcher, designer, and developer working on how institutional power is mediated through technical infrastructures, from user interfaces to web protocols and data structures. I am completing my PhD in Computer Science in the Human Centred AI Lab at the University of Oxford (thesis: Personal Data, Collective Power, supervised by Prof. Sir Nigel Shadbolt), funded by the Ethical Web and Data Architectures Project at the Oxford Martin School. I am also an Associated Researcher and Fellow at the Open Data Institute, where I research platform data access and convene policy round-tables with UK and EU regulators.
My algorithmic audit of Uber's pay and pricing supported a funded UK and EU class action, and I have presented research to UK MPs, the OECD and the European Commission.
Before returning to academia I worked in product management and strategic insights at Splunk, researching differential privacy in distributed analytics and workload prediction. I hold an MSc with Distinction from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA cum laude from Yale. I am London and Oxford based, but always a native San Franciscan at heart.
// Recent Publications
ODI Whitepaper 2026:
J. Stein, S. Worth and E. Simperl, ‘Missing Infrastructure: Semantic Data for Effective Scrutiny of Online Platforms’, Whitepaper, Open Data Institute, Apr. 2026.
CSCW / PACM HCI 2025:
R. Zhao, N. Goel, J. Zhao, J. Stein, T. Berners-Lee and N. Shadbolt, ‘Libertas: Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Computation for Decentralised Personal Data Stores’, Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., vol. 9, no. 7, Oct. 2025.
FAccT 2025:
R. Binns and J. Stein*, et al., ‘Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It: A Longitudinal Study of Uber’s Algorithmic Pay and Pricing’, FAccT ’25: ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Athens, Greece, Jun. 2025, pp. 1484–1497.
INC 2025:
J. Stein and R. Binns, ‘“A Subject Access Request, Then What?”’, in The Many Faces of Data Access: Legal and Policy Implications for Research, Institute of Network Cultures, 2025, pp. 137–158.
CHI 2023:
J. Stein et al., ‘“You are you and the app. There’s nobody else.”: Building Worker-Designed Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony’, in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany: ACM, Apr. 2023, pp. 1–26.
* shared first author. All publications