About
John Villasenor
Expert

John Villasenor

John Villasenor is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. He is also a professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management at UCLA, as well as co-director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy. Villasenor’s work considers the technology, policy, and legal issues arising from key technology trends including the growth of artificial intelligence, the increasing complexity and interdependence of today’s networks and systems, and continued advances in computing and communications.

He has written for the Atlantic, Billboard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, and the Washington Post, and for many academic journals. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, Villasenor was with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed methods of imaging the earth from space. He holds a B.S. from the University of Virginia and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

  • Current Positions

    • Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles
  • Education

    • B.S., University of Virginia
    • M.S., Stanford University
    • Ph.D., Stanford University

Media Coverage

NPR August 5, 2025

The fact of having location tracking means there’s sort of a level of surveillance that I think many potential purchasers of these chips would be — rightly — uncomfortable with…

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CNN January 28, 2025

Rather than impeding China, these AI export controls may be accelerating China’s AI capacity by pushing them to innovate. The export controls, arguably, are counterproductive.

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U.S. News & World Report January 31, 2013

The question of where a homeowner’s control of airspace stops and public airspace begins is already complex. Adding claims by state government to the mix makes it even messier.

December 4, 2012

Obviously when you have an unmanned aircraft, there is no risk of a pilot being shot down and killed or captured in hostile territory, so these unmanned aircraft make it possible to..."

Willamette Week June 20, 2012

Drones are part of this inexorable growth in technologies that are logging almost anything that we do. It’s a sobering time for those of us who came of age in a world where we could..."

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