Meet The Judges

Shazeda Ahmed is a DataX Postdoctoral Scholar at UCLA. She has been a researcher at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Her research has investigated how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaborating on the country’s social credit system, the political economy of emotion-recognition and courtroom AI technologies in China, and the epistemic culture of the emerging field of AI safety. Her work has been featured in media outlets including the Financial Times, WIRED, The New York Times, and the BBC.

Homa Hosseinmardi is an Assistant Professor of Data Science (DataX) and Computational Communication at UCLA, where she directs the OASIS Lab (Online and AI Systems’ Integrity & Safety). Her research takes a holistic, large-scale approach to understanding sociotechnical systems and information ecosystems, with a focus on safety and trustworthiness.

Amir Ghasemian is a visiting scholar at UCLA, where his research lies at the intersection of complex systems and computational social science, with a focus on modeling networks and their dynamic behaviors. Drawing on tools from statistical inference, causal inference, and machine learning, he develops principled methods to address challenges of heterogeneity, interdependence, and bias in large-scale data. His work advances tasks such as community detection, link prediction, and the study of social influence dynamics, as well as applications to digital ecosystems. His website is https://aghasemian.github.io/.