User:Timacuna/Rumman Chowdhury

Lead
Rumman Chowdhury was born in 1980 in Rockland County, New York. She is a Bengali American data scientist, a business founder, and former Responsible Artificial Intelligence Lead at Accenture. She enjoyed watching science fiction and attributes her curiosity about science to the Dana Scully effect. She completed her undergraduate study in Management Science and Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a Master's of Science from Columbia University in Statistics and Quantitative methods. She holds a Doctorate Degree in Political Science from University of California, San Diego. She finished her PhD whilst working in Silicon Valley. Her main interest and focus for her career and higher educational studies was how data can be used to understand people's bias and ways to evaluate the impact of technology on humanity. She has recently joined the META team at Twitter, where she working with her colleagues to make changes to Twitter's AI algorithm to make it more in line with ethical guidelines. She officially took the job to work with twitter in February 2021. She was thrilled because this was an opportunity for her to have the ability to have direct positive impact at a global scale. Rumman Chowdhury's most recent work is an analysis called Examining algorithmic amplification of political content on Twitter. This analysis was talked about and explained in October of 2021. This is one of her most recent studies she has conducted for twitter.

Early Career
Chowdhury taught data science at the boot camp Metis and worked at Quotient before joining Accenture in 2017. She leads their work on responsible artificial intelligence. She is concerned about the AI workforce; particularly on retaining researchers. She is also concerned about algorithmic bias. She has spoken openly about the need to define what ethical AI actually means. She works with companies on developing ethical governance and algorithms that explain their decisions transparently. She is determined to use AI to improve diversity in recruitment. Chowdhury, alongside a team of early career researchers at the Alan Turing Institute, developed a Fairness Tool which scrutinizes the data that is input to an algorithm and identifies whether certain genders (such as race or gender) may influence the outcome. The tool both identifies and tries to fix bias, enabling organizations to make more fair decisions. She designed All.ai, a language analysis tool that can monitor and improve the gender balance of speakers in meetings.In 2020 she founded Parity to bridge the translation gap between risk, legal, and data teams.

She launched X Institute, a program which teaches refugees about data science and marketing. She has given a keynote at Slush, talking about augmenting human capabilities. She delivered a TED talk about humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Chowdhury has written for Forbes and serves on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Wellbeing Metrics Standards for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems working group. She is part of the All-party parliamentary group on Artificial Intelligence.

Current Career
Chowdhury is currently a director for the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team with Twitter. META’s goal is to study and improve the ML systems used within Twitter, this includes biased algorithms that may cause harm to the user. Biased algorithms have been an issue since artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced to the world; traits such as gender, sex, race, or social class hold potential segregation that may result in unfair decisions, META strives avoid this by making Twitter better, fair, accountable, and more transparent for its users. Most projects that META teams do involve research and data analysis, which is why the team is made from Researchers and Engineers. AI is constantly changing and becoming greater, so the META teams have a similar process where they are learning inside and outside of the app and applying that knowledge to build a better Twitter. Future changes that will impact Twitter will be having the algorithms used explainable to the users making the app more transparent, eventually leading to the users customizing or creating the algorithms by themselves. This means that the Twitter community will play an important role to making Twitter a stronger app.

Awards
In 2017 she was included in the 100 Women (BBC). In 2018 she was named One of Five who are Shaping AI by Forbes. She was also apart of part of Biz journals, acknowledged as one of the Bay Area's top 40 Under 40 which aims to recognize people before the age of 40 who are leaders that demonstrate professional excellence in the bay area. Since then she has also been inducted into the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) to celebrate people who have made progress in social challenges.