Dr Malak Sadek is Course Director and Teaching Associate at the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches the Conversational AI module of the MPhil in Human-Inspired AI. She holds a PhD in Design Engineering from Imperial College London's Dyson School of Design Engineering. Her thesis, Designing Responsible AI: Integrating Human Values into AI Design, received the school's 2026 PhD Outstanding Thesis Award.

Trained as a computer engineer (BSc, American University in Cairo) and in human-computer interaction (MSc, University of St Andrews), Malak created the Value-Sensitive Conversational Agent (VSCA) Framework and Toolkit for co-designing chatbots with the communities they serve. She also co-authored a review of 52 co-designed conversational agent studies (Design Studies, 2023). Her recent paper, Using Anti-Values as Conversational AI Design Constraints (ACM CUI 2026), asks what AI should never do.

She now directs the HIVE CAI Lab at CHIA. The lab studies how people experience values in conversational AI and how they can steer them. Her research is on adults, not children: how adults use chatbots, rely on them and are shaped by them. She is not a child-development specialist. She has worked with The Alan Turing Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and was elected Communications Officer of the British Computer Society's Interaction Specialist Group.

In this episode, Malak talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why bias, accented voice assistants and "secretary" chatbots all come from the same gap between builders and users
• Anti-values: deciding what AI should not optimise for, and not just what it should do
• Training future AI builders to wear "both hats": cutting-edge engineering plus psychological, environmental and cultural impact
• Co-designing chatbots with communities, with education among the most common use cases in her review of co-design studies
• Her reaction, as a researcher of adult–AI interaction, to parents choosing the sycophantic chatbot in Pilyoung Kim's study (for child-friendly guardrails, see Everyone.AI)
• Should adults form relationships with AI companions? Personalised guardrails that turn empathy down when a user starts becoming over-reliant
• AI value alignment and our "first-order vs. second-order selves": do people know what's good for them?
• Value sliders in chatbot interfaces, convenience culture, and rethinking assessment with AI declaration forms