I have been working in the field of Artificial Intelligence for the past twenty years - both in industry and academia.

I'm Founder of Humanitarian AI Advisory where I help humanitarian organizations and stakeholders understand how to harness the potential of AI while navigating its pitfalls. I'm Co-founder of RootsAI Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing the value of modern AI to languages and communities that don't have easy access to it today, and to improve representation in AI models by building culturally grounded AI tools. Previously, I served as Senior Advisor to the UN on the use of AI in humanitarian action, and as Chief AI Architect/Director of Innovation on the Tech for Social Impact team within Microsoft Philanthropies, helping humanitarian organizations and nonprofits leverage AI to amplify their impact.

I received my PhD in AI/speech technology from University College London. The topic of my dissertation is accent variation modeling and how to improve speech recognition accuracy for accented speakers. In short, my research offers a mechanism for automatically generating an idiodictionary, a user-specific pronunciation dictionary, at runtime based on accent features extracted directly from the user's speech.

I serve as Board Chair and technology advisor for Spreeha Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving healthcare and education and to empowering women and girls in underserved communities in Bangladesh. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. I have been a member of faculty in the Department of Linguistics since 2009 where I teach in the CLMS program.