Amna Batool

Within privacy, my research explores women’s online privacy concerns through two interrelated themes: 

1) Understanding the perceived and lived experiences of women facing online harms, with a particular emphasis on image-based abuse, including AI-generated content such as sexual deepfakes, and the role of local norms around gender, religion, and social values (e.g., honor, family reputation) in shaping the impact of these harms. [Papers:   1🔗,     2🔗,     3🔗,    4🔗,    5🔗]

2) Critically examining governance mechanisms—both online (e.g., platform content moderation policies and community standards) and offline (e.g., reporting processes involving law enforcement agencies and NGOs)—to investigate how global platform policies intersect with local legal and cultural frameworks, and how these dynamics influence victims' access to justice. [Paper 🔗 ]

My work in responsible and ethical AI focuses on understanding how AI tools operate in real-world sociotechnical contexts and how they can be designed or governed to make AI systems more accountable, transparent, and safe. Broadly, I work across three interrelated themes: 

1. Examining the practical use and limitations of interpretability and fairness tools in industry to understand how practitioners actually integrate (or struggle to integrate) them into workflows. [Paper 🔗 ]

2. Studying the role of AI in high-stakes applications such as content moderation on large platforms like TikTok and Facebook, where questions of responsibility, governance, and user safety come to the forefront.

3. Exploring and improving detection techniques for emerging harms such as sexual deepfakes, where technical advances must be coupled with ethical, legal, and policy considerations.

 In healthcare, my work focuses on two key areas: 

1. Designing culturally tailored digital interventions, such as SMS systems, voice-based platforms, and mobile applications, that address the health information needs of women and frontline healthcare workers while improving public service delivery in low-resource settings. [Papers:  1🔗,    2🔗,    3🔗] 

2. Exploring the societal and structural barriers that limit women’s access to quality healthcare and information in marginalized communities. [Papers:  1🔗,    2🔗,     3🔗,     4🔗]