About Queer in AI
Mission
Queer in AI’s mission is to raise awareness of queer issues in AI/ML, foster a community of queer researchers and celebrate the work of queer scientists. We use “queer” as an umbrella term for people with diverse non-normative sexual orientations, romantic orientations, and/or genders, corresponding to acronyms like LGBTQIA2S+. We also explicitly include those questioning their identities.
Queer in AI was established by queer scientists in AI with the mission to make the AI community a safe and inclusive place that welcomes, supports, and values LGBTQIA2S+ people. We work towards this aim by building a visible community of queer AI scientists through conference workshops, social meetups, conference poster sessions, mentoring programs, graduate application financial aid, and many other initiatives. Another crucial part of our mission is to raise awareness of queer issues in the general AI community and to encourage and highlight research on and solutions to these problems.
Queer in AI’s demographic survey reveals that most queer scientists in our community do not feel completely welcome in conferences or their work environments, with the main reasons being a lack of queer community and role models. Over the past years, Queer in AI has worked towards eliminating these issues, yet the voices of minoritized queer communities, especially transgender, non-binary folks and queer BIPOC folks have still been neglected. Our aim is to highlight issues that these communities face and work with communities to make spaces more inclusive of queer folks.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Admins (DEIAs)
You can reach out to Queer in AI admins by emailing queerinai [at] gmail [dot] com
Please don't send event invites, job opportunities and calls to this email. They should be sent to the mailing list or slack instead.
Raksha is a queer Tamil woman and one of the current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Admins (DEIA) at Queer in AI. Raksha was a founding member of the Alphabet Workers Union where she led multiple successful campaigns for worker protections and ethical practices at Google. Twitter: raxsha
Ashwin is a queer bahujan researcher at IIIT Hyderabad and and one of the current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Admins (DEIA) at Queer in AI. They work broadly in computational social science and AI ethics. They help organize events, draft RFI’s and are committed to developing and expanding the QueerInAI community in the global south.
Twitter: @_ashwxn
Core Organizers
Pan is a Postdoc at Caltech whose main research interest lies in machine learning and optimization. He is the co-chair of the Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program and the Graduate School Application Review Program. Twitter: @iampanxu
William is a PhD student at UW studying object representations and ML ethics. William helps organize different Queer in AI events and administer the graduate admissions aid programs. Twitter: @willie_agnew
Ti is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, Finland, working on probabilistic models and "AI" assistants. At Queer in AI, Ti organized the first fully-virtual workshop at ICML 2020, is supporting members in cases of conflict or any other concerns, and helps out wherever else is needed.
Claas is a PhD student at the University of Toronto where he tries to find out why reinforcement learning is so hard. For Queer in AI, he organized NeurIPS 2021, monitors the mailing list and pushes for more events at robotics conferences. Twitter: @c_voelcker
Danica is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii, working on representation learning and statistical learning theory. At Queer in AI, she helps organize events at AI conferences and to improve trans-inclusive policies.
Sharvani is a software engineer at Microsoft - she received her BS in computer science from UCLA in 2021 and co-founded QWER Hacks. At Queer in AI, she works on organizing workshops + graphic design / publicity + supporting undergraduates. Twitter: @sharvanilla
Maria is a PhD candidate at Purdue University, focusing broadly on neural-symbolic methods for NLP and discourse analysis. At Queer in AI, she helps organize events and workshops at NLP conferences.
Arjun is a brown queer neurodivergent PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their research focuses on trustworthy and inclusive graph machine learning and natural language processing. They help organize Queer in AI workshops, socials, and mentoring. Twitter: @arjunsubgraph
Sabine is a queer person who just finished her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. They are interested in multilingual NLP, AI ethics, science communication and art. They organized Queer in AI socials and were one of the Social Chairs at NAACL 2021.
Raj is a gay New Yorker and an Assistant Professor at Iona College. His research is in explainable AI and autonomous robot navigation. He has helped organized Queer in AI events at AI and robotics conferences, such as AAAI 2022 and AAMAS 2022.
Denis is a non-binary, bisexual, and generally queer person and a Lecturer (=Assistant Professor) at the University of Sheffield. Their research areas include health and disability informatics, translational data science, and NLP. They are bringing Queer in AI events to the AMIA community starting in 2022.
Luca is a queer researcher working on Natural Language Processing (NLP); currently, they work at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) as part of the Semantic Scholar team. At Queer In AI, they work on socials and workshops planning for NLP conferences, scholarship programs, and sponsors relations. Twitter: @soldni
Maria is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, working on computational linguistics and NLP. At Queer in AI, she helps run the Graduate School Application Program, which supports queer scholars pursuing careers in STEM.
Hetvi is a grad student in AI and is primarily interested in understanding biological systems using mathematics & CS. At Queer in AI, Hetvi is currently organizing NAACL 2022 workshop and previously has organized workshops before. Twitter: @vuisnotabot
Rapha is a Research Associate at Google Brain and a co-founder of Queer in AI. He’s deeply interested in how humans and computers create (or don't) ideas, concepts, meaning, and how they interact (or don't) with reality, other's perceptions, culture, etc. He currently explores these questions via Computer Vision research.
Natalia Bilenko (she/they)
Natalia is a data scientist / software engineer, and a founding organizer of Queer in AI. Natalia has worked on algorithms related to narrative perception in the brain, heart disease detection, and fashion forecasting. At Queer in AI, Natalia has helped organize events and start initiatives for member safety, speaker honoraria, and sponsorship guidelines.
Huan is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Huan's research focuses on the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence. At Queer in AI, Huan helps on organizing events and mentorship programs at machine learning conferences, such as AAAI 2022 and ICML 2022.