Welcome!


I am a Computational Social Scientist, working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Society, with a special focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). I am currently a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research. I also hold a Research Affiliate position at the Stanford SPARQ institute. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. I obtained my PhD from Columbia University in 2015.

I read, think, write, and speak about employing NLP techniques for socially beneficial applications, as well as investigating (and mitigating) ethical and fairness failures in NLP models. An overarching theme of my recent research is cross-cultural considerations in answering these questions. I engage in both critical questioning of the underlying assumptions of ethics and fairness research that may fail in non-Western geo-cultural contexts, as well as building methods and resources to meaningfully address these issues in global contexts. My prior research includes building scalable ways to identify and address large-scale societal issues such as racial disparities in policing, workplace incivility, gender bias and stereotypes, and abusive behavior online. To this end, I collaborate with researchers in Machine Learning and NLP, as well as social scientists and practitoners from diverse backgrounds.

I served as a Diversity and Inclusion co-chair for the ACL 2020 conference. I often serve as an Area Chair for the Ethics and NLP and Computational Social Sciences tracks in NLP conferences. I also co-organize the annual Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) (usually co-located with *ACL/EMNLP conferences).

Interests


  • Fairness & Ethics in AI
  • Cross-cultural Considerations in AI
  • Tackling Online Abuse
  • Computational Social Sciences
  • Participatory Methods in AI


(Selected) Recent News, Awards, and Grants


  • Apr 2021
    Keynote Speaker. Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. European ACL (EACL).
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    Keynote at the EACL Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion., where I spoke about the need to think beyond data and models for meaningful `"Responsible AI".
  • Oct 2020
    Invited Panelist. AI Fairness & Employment of Persons with Disabilities. US Government's Interagency Accessibility Forum.
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    Panelist at the Annual Interagency Accessibility Forum on the topic: "Artificial Intelligence, the Emerging Workplace, and Accessibility for People with Disabilities.""
  • Nov 2019
    Invited Panelist: United Nations (UN)'s event on ``Human Rights-based Approach to AI''. Geneva, Switzerland
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    Panelist on Transparency, Access to Information and Accountability at the “A Human Rights-based Approach to AI” event in Geneva, Switzerland, co-organized by UN Global Pulse and the UN Human Rights Council
  • Nov 2019
    Tutorial on "Bias and Fairness in Natural Language Processing " at EMNLP 2019, Hong Kong.
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    Co-taught with Vicente Ordóñez Román and Kai-Wei Chang, representing Magaret MMitchell.
  • Oct 2019
    Invited Panelist: UCSB Responsible Machine Learning Summit. Santa Barbara, USA.
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    Panelist at the Responsible Machine Learning Summit at UC Santa Barbara, California.
  • Sep 2019
    Invited speaker at AthNLP Summer School in Athens, Greece
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    "AthNLP 2019 will take place September 18th-25th at the campus of NCSR “Demokritos” in Athens, Greece. The summer school is organized jointly by NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens University of Economics and Business, RC “Athena” and Heriot-Watt University. AthNLP cooperates closely with the organizers of LxMLS, building upon their success."
  • Jun 2019
    Diversity and Inclusion Chair; ACL 2020. Seattle, USA.
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    Will be serving as a Diversity and Inclusion Chair (co-chairing with Barbara Plank) for ACL 2020 in Seattle! Please get in touch if you have any thoughts, tips, suggestions on this front.
  • May 2019
    Tutorial on "Socially Responsible NLP" at TheWebConference 2019. San Francisco, USA.
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    Co-taught with Yulia Tsvetkov (CMU) and Rob Voigt (Stanford). Check this link for more details!
  • Oct 2018
    New Job: Research Scientist at Google, San Francisco, USA.
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    Started working as a Research Scientist at Google, to work on issues around algorithmic fairness and ethics.
  • Jun 2018
    Invited panelist at the Ethics in NLP panel at the NAACL 2018 Industry track. New Orleans, USA.
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    "The panel consists of experts from both industry and academia, who focus their studies on ethical issues in NLP (and AI in general). They will discuss, among other topics, sources of biases that may creep into solutions, what we, as NLP practitioners, can do to raise awareness of such potential biases and reduce them, as well as societal impact of such unintended biases in deployed solutions."
  • Jun 2018
    Tutorial on "Socially Responsible NLP" at NAACL 2018. New Orleans, USA.
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    Co-taught with Yulia Tsvetkov (CMU) and Rob Voigt (Stanford). Check this link for more details!
  • Feb 2018
    The Cozzarelli Prize by the National Academy of Sciences!
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    The 2017 PNAS paper titled Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect that I co-authored was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for outstanding scientific excellence and originality.
  • Nov 2017
    Co-organizing the 2018 EMNLP workshop on Abusive Language
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    The 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online has been accepted to be colocated with EMNLP at Brussels.
  • Sep 2017
    Crowd Flower Impact funding of $175K to Study Online Incivility
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    Our proposal (co-written with Yulia Tsetkov, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Chris Potts) titled "Fostering Civility in Online Communication" was granted a Social Impact sponsorship of $175K from Crowd Flower. PI: David Jurgens.
  • Aug 2017
    Invited Panelist at the 2017 ACL workshop on Abusive Language
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    The 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online, co-located with ACL 2017, brought researchers of various disciplines together to discuss approaches to abusive language. Panel discussion topics included the responsibility of companies and governments in monitoring speech, privacy and ethical implications of abusive language detection, and more.
  • Jul 2017
    Stanford Cyber Initiative grant to study political framing!
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    A Stanford Cyber Initiative proposal titled "Political Framing and its Propagation in Media" that I have contributed to was accepted (RFP here). PIs: Dan Jurafsky (Linguistics & CS), Matthew Gentzkow (Economics), Jure Leskovec (CS), Jennifer Pan (Communication).
  • Jun 2017
    PNAS Publication of Our Study on Police Body Camera Videos
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    The first paper on our work with the Oakland Police Department using NLP to study racial disparities in policing got published at PNAS (Press Release), and was covered by an array of national and international media: NYTimes, LATimes, BBC, PBS, CNN, Time, TechCrunch, and more.

Work

  • Present 2021

    Senior Research Scientist

    Google Research

  • 2021 2018

    Research Scientist

    Google Research

  • 2018 2015

    Postdoctoral Researcher

    Stanford University, Department of Computer Science

  • 2015 2009

    Research Assistant

    Columbia University, Center for Computational Learning Systems

  • Summer 2014

    Software Engineering Intern

    Google, Local Question Answering

  • Summer 2013

    Research Intern

    IBM Research, Watson-MD (DeepQA) Question Answering

  • Summer 2012

    Research Scientist Intern

    Avaya Labs, Collaborative Applications Research

  • Summer 2011

    Research Intern

    Siemens Research, Semantic Heart Medical Question Answering

  • 2008 2004

    Application Software Engineer

    Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

Education

  • Ph.D. 2015

    Ph.D. in Computer Science

    Columbia University

  • M.Phil.2013

    M.Phil. in Computer Science

    Columbia University

  • M.S.2009

    M.S. in Computer Science

    Columbia University

  • B.Tech.2004

    B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering

    Cochin University of Science and Technology