Our Team
Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin
Founder · Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin is an AI governance strategist, computational rhetorician, and critical AI scholar whose work sits at the intersection of responsible technology, digital sovereignty, and emerging legal frameworks. Her practice is built on a rare combination: two decades of senior leadership inside the technology industry, paired with peer-reviewed academic research that has produced original frameworks now in use across healthcare, public sector, and Global South policy contexts.
She holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo, where her doctoral research, supervised by Dr. Randy Allen Harris (Department of English and Cheriton School of Computer Science) and Dr. Lai-Tze Fan (Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change), produced the Ethotic Heuristic framework for responsible AI design in healthcare and surveillance contexts. The framework anchors peer-reviewed publications in Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Taylor and Francis, 2024), the Springer HCI International proceedings (2022), and the 2025 Springer FICC volume on surveillance technology. Earlier scholarship includes co-authorship with Dr. Safiya Noble on race, AI, and technology (IEEE ISTAS, 2021).
Her industry record spans more than twenty years of senior research, design, and innovation leadership inside regulated and high-stakes technology environments. She led Human Factors and Experience Design at Siemens Corporate Research for Siemens Medical, Health Systems, and Health Informatics. As Senior Manager of User Research and Research Lab at BlackBerry, she is co-inventor on fourteen patents. She served as Director of Research and Product Design at Autodesk and, most recently, as Senior Director of Design Strategy at Manulife's Innovation Hub for the Individual Insurance and Group Benefits Division. The thread across these roles is a sustained commitment to building technology that protects the people it is built to serve, an orientation she now brings to the AI moment.
Dr. Lubin joins the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) Digital Policy Hub as an incoming postdoctoral fellow for the 2026 to 2027 cohort, focusing on AI value systems. She is founder and chair of the AI Global South Summit, which in its inaugural year convened more than 150 leaders across academia, policy, and industry to shape AI conversations for Global South contexts. She has contributed to multiple workshops with members of the Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence, informing an impact report submitted to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) on responsible AI adoption and the framing around Canada's Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA). Recent platform engagements include keynote panelist at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences AI Panel (2026) and panelist at the How to Govern AI session at MIT (2024).
She teaches at the University of Waterloo's Department of Philosophy as a sessional instructor on AI, algorithmic bias, and digital surveillance in the Global South, and serves as Outreach Officer for the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She is a Certified Design Thinking facilitator, a skillset that informs how HFAITI translates complex interdisciplinary work into actionable strategy for ministries, health authorities, education systems, and international institutions. She writes regularly on AI, governance, and the human cost of technology at kemlaurin.substack.com, and is currently developing book-length work on AI value systems for publication.
At HFAITI, Dr. Lubin leads the institute's strategic direction, the applied design and clinical AI advisory practice, and the convening platform that connects the firm's Canadian work to its international reach.
Dr. Helen Beny
Co-founder · Chief of Policy and Governance
Dr. Helen Beny is a comparative public policy researcher and AI governance specialist whose work focuses on the structural conditions that shape digital rights, surveillance, and the protection of marginalized communities. Her practice combines rigorous comparative analysis with applied policy delivery across Canadian and international contexts, with particular depth in platform governance, privacy law, biometric infrastructure, and digital public infrastructure in African and Global South settings.
She holds a PhD in Political Science and Comparative Public Policy from McMaster University, where her doctoral research examined internet shutdowns as structural expressions of ethnic and political discrimination. The work applied a comparative analytical lens that holds democratic and authoritarian states to the same evidentiary standard and centred the communities most likely to bear the consequences of poorly designed digital systems. This methodological orientation, holding power accountable to consistent standards regardless of where it sits, anchors the comparative governance work she now delivers for HFAITI clients.
Her Canadian policy record sits directly on the territory HFAITI addresses. As Research Coordinator with the Tech Lobby and the Communications Governance Observatory at McMaster, she has contributed to policy analysis on platform regulation, surveillance, and digital rights in Canadian and global contexts. Her published work appears in the Journal of Information Policy, ZED Books, and Policy Options, spanning technology lobbying, privacy law, AI governance, and the governance of biometric infrastructure. Over the past five years she has led multi-country research engagements across East Africa and South Africa, produced policy briefs and governance recommendations for government partners, and secured more than $150,000 CAD in competitive federal and institutional research funding. She holds a postdoctoral affiliation with OpenAIR at York University and conducts active research with the African Digital Rights Network.
Her international work positions HFAITI to engage credibly with African governments, multilateral institutions, civil society organisations, and development partners pursuing digital sovereignty, AI capacity building, and culturally adapted governance frameworks. Few Canadian advisory firms can claim equivalent depth across both the Canadian regulatory landscape and the African digital rights ecosystem; Dr. Beny brings both, in active practice, with peer-reviewed scholarship and government engagement on the record.
Alongside this work she sustains community-based civic practice through digital literacy programming and public writing on censorship and technology-enabled discrimination, an extension of her conviction that academic and policy expertise must remain accountable to the publics it claims to serve.
At HFAITI, Dr. Beny leads the institute's governance and policy advisory practice, including baseline regulatory assessments, comparative gap analyses, Regulatory Impact Assessments, and jurisdictional feasibility analysis. She ensures that every recommendation HFAITI delivers is evidence-grounded, regulatorily literate, and aligned with the Canadian, international, and Indigenous governance landscapes its clients operate within.