Stefka Schmid is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University with the GEOCLOUD project. Her research aims to gain a better understanding of how states interact with each other and with cloud providers in shaping the geography of computation. She is specifically interested in how governments interact with ‘hyperscalers’ as technology becomes geopoliticized, as well as in how companies themselves may advance geopolitical alongside economic ambitions.
Stefka holds a doctorate from TU Darmstadt, Germany, and has studied international relations in Heidelberg, Aberystwyth, Darmstadt and Frankfurt. Her prior work has focused on the relationship between technology and security, governmental visions of AI as well as human-computer interaction in crisis scenarios.