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

My primary occupation is as Founder of Humanitarian AI Advisory where I help guide humanitarian organizations and stakeholders on their AI journey. Previously, I served as Chief AI Architect/Director of Innovation on the Tech for Social Impact team within Microsoft Philanthropies, partnering with nonprofits and humanitarian organizations on applying a wide range of technologies to help address the big challenges they're working on today. You can read more about our work here: microsoft.com/nonprofits.

I received my PhD in 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 am a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a board member and technology advisor to World Humanitarian Forum and to Spreeha Foundation. I have been a member of faculty in the Department of Linguistics since 2009 where I teach in the CLMS program.