Camille François

Camille François is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where she co-leads the Institute of Global Politics' Technology & Democracy Initiative with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa. She is also the founder and president of ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), a technology nonprofit incubated at SIPA's Institute of Global Politics and launched at the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit to build open-source safety infrastructure.

One of the world's leading experts on trust and safety, François has spent more than a decade detecting and mitigating harms emerging from digital technologies, from child safety to violent extremism. She served as a senior executive across the technology industry — Principal Researcher at Google, Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, and Senior Director of Trust & Safety at Niantic — building high-performing teams whose work has shaped safety practices across major platforms.

Her academic research, published in leading books and journals, has influenced real-world practice in domains such as open source (including in artificial intelligence), the mitigation of online harms, and the development of public interest technology. She was among the first to apply cybersecurity methods (such as red teaming and bug bounties) to the study and mitigation of online harms, and has helped shape emerging frameworks for openness in AI. Her analytical contributions include the widely adopted Actor–Behavior–Content ("ABC") safety framework, a reference point across the technology industry and government, and, most recently, the DIRE taxonomy of trust and safety tooling (Detection, Investigation, Review, Enforcement).

François also advises governments and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. She co-led one of the two independent investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election commissioned by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; co-chaired, by appointment of President Emmanuel Macron, the États Généraux de l'Information, France's national consultative assembly on the future of the information society; and led the French government's 2022 inquiry into immersive technologies. She previously served as special advisor to the Chief Technology Officer of France.

François has been named to TIME's 100 Next and MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, and is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation, and a former Fulbright scholar. She is a research affiliate of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the French Institute of Geopolitics.

Education

• Ph.D. in Geopolitics, Institut Français de Géopolitique, Université Paris 8 (add year)
• Master of International Affairs (International Security Policy), Columbia University SIPA
• Master's in Human Rights, Sciences Po