Our Guests

Dr. Nouha Dziri is an AI research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Her research investigates a wide variety of problems across NLP and AI including building state-of-the-art language models and understanding their limits and inner workings. She also works on AI safety to ensure the responsible deployment of LLMs while enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Prior to Ai2, she worked at Google DeepMind and Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD from the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Her work has been published in top-tier AI venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, TACL, ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, and featured in TechCrunch, LeMonde, The Economist, Science News and QuantaMagazine.

Dr. Amanda Cercas Curry is a researcher at CENTAI Institute, where she is working on applied NLP, fairness and evaluation. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Feminism with the aim of building more just NLP systems. She is particularly interested in ethics, with a strong influence from feminism. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at MilaNLP in Bocconi University. She completed her PhD at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She also co-hosts a podcast where she discusses all things tech ethics, called Let's Chat Ethics.

Aparna Balagopalan is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. Her research broadly focuses on developing fair, interpretable, and robust models by carefully re-evaluating and surfacing assumptions in machine learning-based measurements in socially-relevant contexts. Aparna has held research intern positions at the Stanford RegLab, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, the Technische Universität, Dresden as a DAAD-WISE scholar, and at the Philips Innovation Campus, Bengaluru in the healthcare R&D team.

Dr. Angelica Lim is an AI roboticist. She is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University and leads the SFU Rosie Lab, where she builds artificial intelligence software for robots to interact with social intelligence and empathy. Her research addresses the question 'Could a robot have feelings?' by combining neuroscience, machine learning and developmental psychology. Angelica has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Kyoto University, Japan, specializing in AI applied to Robotics, and a B.Sc. in Computing Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence) from Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Faiza is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Monark Health, an innovative startup dedicated to leveraging AI to support individuals overcoming Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), and she also works as an AI consultant. As a Natural Language Processing (NLP) scientist, Faiza specializes in fairness in language models, diverse NLP applications, and applied research, ensuring that AI technologies are equitable and inclusive. Faiza holds a Master’s and PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University. She further developed her expertise through postdoctoral research at the University Health Network (UHN) and St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and as a co-founder of a healthcare startup. She has also had the opportunity to teach as a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her career spans both industry and academia, including roles as a Data Scientist at Manulife and an Applied Machine Learning Scientist at the Vector Institute for AI, where she has led cross-functional teams, directed collaborative research initiatives, and held workshops to bridge academic research with real-world applications. Her expertise extends to stakeholder engagement, AI adoption strategies, and mentoring junior team members. Faiza is also deeply committed to responsible AI development. She served as the lead organizer of the Responsible Language Models Workshop at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2024.

Wanru Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, where she is supervised by Prof. Nic Lane in the Cambridge Machine Learning Systems Lab (CaMLSys). Her research focuses on democratizing large model development through distributed learning, data curation, and modular model design. She develops frameworks that enable organizations to jointly train and adapt models across data silos and heterogenous compute, with the goal of making AI more accessible, efficient, and inclusive. Previously, she completed her M.Phil. in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, graduating with Distinction.

Dr. Dieuwke Hupkes is a research scientist at Meta AI Research. She completed her PhD in computational linguistics at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam under Willem Zuidema, followed by a postdoc at the Amsterdam unit of ELLIS. Her PhD at the University of Amsterdam focused on hierarchy and interpretability in neural models, exploring how AI systems can help us understand human language processing. And when she is not researching computational linguistics, she is competing in pole dancing championships, where she won the Dutch national title in doubles in 2018.