AAAI 2022 Queer in AI Social and Mentorship Events

About

Queer in AI’s presence at AAAI 2022 aims to create a safe and inclusive casual networking and socializing space for LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies involved with AI. We aim to create a community space where attendees can connect with each other, bond over shared experiences, and learn from each individual’s unique insights into AI, queerness, and beyond!

Structure & How to Join

We are organizing two events at AAAI:

A social event, to bring the community together, from 8 am to 10am PST on Wednesday, February 23rd. We have two exciting speakers talking about AI's interactions with gender and queerness, followed by an informal networking session. The event will be free and open to all. The sign-up form can be found here.

We will also host a mentorship session for undergraduate and junior grad students at 8am PST on Monday, February 28th, where we'll have a few speakers talk about their journey since undergrad, a Q&A session, and break-out groups to pair students with a more senior member of the community. To attend, please register in advance of the conference. The registration form can be found here.

If those times don't work for you (sorry, these around-the-world conferences are hard...), please still consider filling out the event sign-up form to be potentially matched with a conference buddy, and join the Queer in AI Slack and mailing list if you're not already on them!

Code of Conduct

Please read Queer in AI code of conduct which will be strictly followed at all times. Recording (screen recording or screenshots) is prohibited. All participants are expected to maintain the confidentiality of other participants.

Queer in AI adheres to Queer in AI Anti-harassment policy. Any participant who experiences harassment or hostile behavior may contact Queer in AI Safety Team. Please be assured that if you approach us, your concerns will be kept in strict confidence, and we will consult with you on any actions taken.

Speakers

Jessica Jung is a Korean transwoman and independent researcher, formerly with the University of California Berkeley, focusing on the impact of emerging technologies on marginalized populations, particularly queer trans people of color and sex workers.

Mentors + Volunteers

Arjun Subramonian (they/them) is a first-year PhD student and Cota-Robles fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their research focuses on trustworthy graph machine learning and natural language processing, including fairness, biases, and ethics. They are a core organizer of Queer in AI, a NAACL 2022 DEI chair, and a co-founder of QWER Hacks. They love running, hiking, birding, earrings, and listening to music!

Claas Voelcker (he/him) is a second-year PhD student at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute. He investigates the performance of predictive models for downstream tasks such as reinforcement learning and robotics and asks how model learning errors contribute to sub-optimal decision making. For Queer in AI, he organized conference socials and the NeurIPS 2021 workshop. He is a passionate cook, reader, singer and tabletop games enthusiast.

Huan Zhang (He/Him) is a postdoctoral researcher at CMU and he received his Ph.D. degree at UCLA in 2020. Huan's research focuses on the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence, especially on developing formal methods to guarantee the robustness and safety of machine learning. Huan was awarded an IBM Ph.D. fellowship and the Adversarial ML Rising Star Award sponsored by MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Atrisha Sarkar (she/her) is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research focus is on behavioral game theory and models of bounded rationality in multi-agent systems, with applications to human driving behavior. Prior to her PhD, she spent eight years working in industry, most of which was at IBM Software Labs.

Jeffrey is an undergraduate student at Columbia University, majoring in mathematics and computer science. Their research focuses on taking advantage of the properties of certain geometric spaces to develop better models for machine learning. In their free time, Jeffrey is also a street musician in New York City.

Umut (they/them) is a Black Caribbean non-binary person from Colombia. With an MA in Cultural Studies and BA in Communications Studies. A dedicated advocator and activist for the rights of queer people for 15 years. Right now is part of Queer in AI as core organizer and their main research topics are queer rights, AI and ethics and Internet Governance. Also loves to write poetry and is a proud cat parent of four.

Ahnjili is a New York-born, Netherlands-based data scientist and PhD student. Her research focuses on developing smartphone-based algorithms that can monitors one’s mental and physical health. Ahnjili also creates conceptual art about AI.

Organizers

For any concerns or questions, please reach out to either of us using the contact info given on our websites. Your concerns will be kept confidential.

Raj Korpan (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Iona College. His research is in explainable artificial intelligence with a focus on autonomous robot navigation using hierarchical planning and cognitive models. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Danica J. Sutherland (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia and a CIFAR AI Chair at Amii. Her research interests include learning and testing on sets and distributions, learning "deep kernels," and representation learning and statistical learning theory more broadly. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ashwin (they/them) is a queer non-binary research associate at PreCog, IIIT Hyderabad, working broadly in computational social science and AI ethics. At QueerInAI, they help with event organization and drafting RFI’s for the regulation of AI systems.

Javier Chiyah-Garcia (he/him) is a third year PhD candidate at Heriot-Watt University. His research interest is in human-robot collaboration through natural language, particularly using vision and language models and in interactive and situated conversations.

Kruno Lehman (he/him) is in his second year of MSc in Statistics at ETH Zürich. He is interested in Bayesian statistics, neural network theory and high-dimensional learning theory. At QueerInAI, he organizes workshops and socials at conferences.

Contact Us

Email: queerinai [at] gmail [dot] com