Announcing Dr. Rumman Chowdhury as Berkman Klein Center Responsible AI Fellow
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is thrilled to announce that Dr. Rumman Chowdhury has joined its annual fellowship cohort.
Dr. Chowdhury expands on an impressive track record of pioneering work in applied algorithmic ethics. Dr. Chowdhury was most recently the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. She is currently CEO and Founder of Parity Consulting and the Parity Responsible Innovation Fund.
“Tech companies, regulators, and importantly, the general public are grappling with the immediate need to responsibly wield emerging technologies,” said Chowdhury. “I am glad to root this standard-bearing work at Berkman Klein, an independent, third-party center that thoughtfully bridges academic and practitioner perspectives.”
Dr. Chowdhury is noted for generating unique sociotechnical solutions for ethical, explainable, and transparent AI. At Berkman Klein, she will collaborate with the Center’s vibrant, collaborative research community of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners while working closely with BKC Executive Director Sue Hendrickson to strengthen the intellectual foundation of the Center’s work on responsible AI.
“We are so deeply impressed by Rumman’s sustained leadership in improving the state of ethics, accountability, transparency, and responsibility in the social media landscape generally, and with respect to large language models in particular,” said Hendrickson. “Her expert perspective will meaningfully enrich the Center’s ability to impact and inform both scholarly and public debates in the field of responsible AI.”
The Responsible AI fellowship connects Dr. Chowdhury to Berkman Klein's broad community of disciplines, ranging from law and philosophy to informatics and computer science. Fellows engage BKC's far-reaching network through events, listserv dialogues, reading groups, joint projects, and more.
Dr. Chowdhury is also currently a Research Affiliate at the Minderoo Center for Democracy and Technology at Cambridge University and a visiting researcher at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She is deeply engaged in AI global policy, serving as a board member of the UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and on UNESCO’s Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. She has helped shape policy as advisor to the UK House of Lords Parliamentary group on AI, in her testimony to the FTC, New York City Algorithmic Commission, the UN, OECD, Partnership on AI, and other global AI and ethics organizations.
Dr. Chowdhury serves on multiple boards, including Oxford University’s Commission on AI and Governance, the UK’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, AI4All, a group dedicated to drawing underrepresented groups into STEM, the SSRC’s Just Tech Advisory Group, the University of Virginia’s Data Science Program, and Patterns, a data science journal by the publishers of Cell. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master's degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.