Researchers and scholars who go deep where others perform.

Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin

Founder · Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin is an AI governance strategist, computational rhetorician, and critical AI scholar who pairs two decades of senior technology leadership with peer-reviewed research now used across healthcare, public sector, and Global South policy contexts.

She holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo, where her doctoral work produced the Ethotic Heuristic, a framework for responsible AI design in healthcare and surveillance, anchoring publications in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Springer proceedings. Her industry record spans senior research and design leadership at Siemens Medical, BlackBerry, where she is co-inventor on fourteen patents, and Autodesk. The thread across all of it is a commitment to building technology that protects the people it is meant to serve.

She is Executive Director of the AI Global South Summit, which convenes leaders across academia, policy, and industry, and an incoming postdoctoral fellow in the 2026 to 2027 cohort at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where her work focuses on AI value systems. She lectures at the University of Waterloo on AI, algorithmic bias, and digital surveillance, and writes on AI, governance, and the human cost of technology at kemlaurin.substack.com. At HFAITI, she leads the institute’s strategy and its applied design and clinical AI advisory practice.

Author of Design Heuristics for Emerging Technologies (Universal Write Publications, 2025), a framework for designing equitable AI for practitioners and policymakers.

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Dr. Helen Beny

Co-founder · Chief of Policy and Governance

Dr. Helen Beny is a comparative public policy researcher and AI governance specialist focused on digital rights, surveillance, and the protection of marginalized communities, with particular depth in platform governance, privacy law, and biometric infrastructure across African and Global South settings.

She holds a PhD in Political Science and Comparative Public Policy from McMaster University, where her research examined internet shutdowns as structural expressions of discrimination, holding democratic and authoritarian states to the same evidentiary standard. Her published work appears in the Journal of Information Policy, ZED Books, and Policy Options. Over the past five years she has led multi-country research across East and South Africa, secured more than $150,000 in competitive funding, and built active ties with the African Digital Rights Network and OpenAIR at York University.

Few Canadian advisory firms can claim equivalent depth across both the Canadian regulatory landscape and the African digital rights ecosystem. At HFAITI, Dr. Beny leads the governance and policy advisory practice, including regulatory assessments, gap analyses, and jurisdictional feasibility work, ensuring every recommendation is evidence-grounded and regulatorily literate.

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