Dr. Aadarsh Padiyath finishes his PhD: GenAI contracts, adversarial thinking, and ethics without whistleblowing

Aadarsh Padiyath defended his dissertation in March, 2026. Aadarsh is well-known to readers of this blog. Aadarsh had a guest post in 2024 exploring the techno-determinism he sees in a lot of the work in computing education research related to Generative AI (see here). I wrote last year (see post) about his work on creating and validating an instrument to measure Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing. He’s a human-centered AI researcher who works on “reliance boundaries.” The last study in his dissertation was about computing professionals rather than students. Most of his PhD work was about studying students — how they thought about critical computing, and how they thought about generative AI. For his last study, he wanted to get a better understanding of where the students end up. What would the students actually face when they went from the classroom into companies? That would complete the path described in the title of his dissertation, “Critical Consciousness in Computing…