Speakers

Dr. Nithya Sambasivan is a Staff Researcher at PAIR and leads the HCI group at Google Research India, Bangalore. She is an affiliate faculty at the Paul G. Allen Center for CS & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on designing Responsible AI, including data, fairness, trust, and privacy, by centering marginalized communities in the Global South. Within Google, her research has been foundational to expanding the company’s focus to the Global South and incorporated into many products and strategies. She has a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences from UC Irvine, and an MS from Georgia Tech, focusing on HCI. She has done stints at Microsoft Research India, IBM T J Watson, and Nokia Research Tampere.

Dr. Urvashi Aneja is the Founding Director of Tandem Research, an interdisciplinary research collective that generates policy insights at the interface of technology, society, and sustainability. Her current research focuses on the societal impact of algorithmic decision-making systems in India and frameworks for their governance. She leads Tandem’s Future of Work & Learning and Artificial Intelligence & Society initiatives. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Asia Pacific program at Chatham House, UK, and a member of the T-20 Task Force for the Future of Work in G20 countries. Urvashi has been a member of government committees on Frontier Technology in India and Skills for a Digital India and has also led knowledge sessions for members of parliament on the use of AI in India. She also writes in national media publications on technology and society transitions in India. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of International Relations at the OP Jindal Global University and a Research Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, India. Urvashi has a DPhil and MPhil from the Department of Politics & International Relation at the University of Oxford, UK.

Arunima is currently the AI Lead, Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum. She leads the co-design of governance protocol and technology policy frameworks for artificial intelligence for maximum benefit to society and mitigating any unwanted outcomes, biases, and risks. Arunima has 20+ years of experience in research, corporate growth and strategy initiatives, technology policy with a special focus on data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. She has led the Global Applied Intelligence Research of Accenture and also worked in technology consulting and research roles in organizations like Gartner. Arunima has been leading several initiatives with multi-stakeholder communities around AI and ethics and operationalizing AI ethics guidelines across several sectoral use cases and applications.

Dr. Catalina Goanta is an assistant professor at Maastricht University, and a researcher on social media governance, web monetization, privacy, cryptography, decentralization, and digital monitoring tools for consumer protection. She received her LL.B. from the Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest. She then completed an LL.M. at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, specializing in European comparative and international law, and then obtained an M.Sc. in public policy and human development from the United Nations University-MERIT Maastricht Graduate School of Governance. In 2014, Catalina was awarded the Maastricht University Wijnand Wijnen education prize, and her projects on innovating legal education have been shortlisted for the Re-Imagine Education Awards at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and 2016. She spent a year from Feb 2018 - Feb 2019 as Niels Stensen visiting scholar at the University of St. Gallen and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is also a non-residential fellow of the Stanford Transatlantic Technology Law Forum at Stanford Law School.

Dr. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral research fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University. She is also a Center for Technology, Society, and Policy (CTSP) Fellow at UC Berkeley for 2020-21. She received her Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of California Irvine in Sep 2020. Her dissertation titled ‘Platform Living – theorizing life, work and ethical enactments in the gig economy’ looked at work, consumption, and life experiences within gig platforms through ethnographic research in Bengaluru (among other places). She is also pursuing research on the histories of datafication drawing on the histories and presents of post colonies. She is pursuing this research through the CTSP fellowship as well as through an international research award supported by the Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI. She was a Technology, Law and Society Fellow from 2017-18 at UC Irvine and an alumna of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University from 2016-17.