Rumman Chowdhury

Chowdhury was born in Rockland County, New York.[2] Her parents are Bangladeshi immigrants. She enjoyed watching science fiction and attributes her curiosity about science to the Dana Scully effect.[3] She completed her undergraduate study in management science and political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] She joined Columbia University for her postgraduate study in statistics and quantitative methods.[3] She holds a doctorate in political science from University of California, San Diego.[2][1] She is interested in how data can be used to understand people's bias and ways to evaluate the impact of technology on humanity.[2] She finished her PhD whilst working in Silicon Valley.[4]

Chowdhury taught data science at the boot camp Metis and worked at Quotient before joining Accenture in 2017.[2] She leads their work on responsible artificial intelligence.[2] She is concerned about the AI workforce; particularly on retaining researchers.[2] She is also concerned about algorithmic bias.[2] She has spoken openly about the need to define what ethical AI actually means.[5] She works with companies on developing ethical governance and algorithms that explain their decisions transparently.[6] She is determined to use AI to improve diversity in recruitment.[7] Chowdhury, alongside a team of early career researchers at the Alan Turing Institute, developed a Fairness Tool which scrutinises the data that is input to an algorithm and identifies whether certain genders (such as race or gender) may influence the outcome.[8] The tool both identifies and tries to fix bias, enabling organisations to make more fair decisions.[9] She designed All.ai, a language analysis tool that can monitor and improve the gender balance of speakers in meetings.[10]

She launched X Institute, a program which teaches refugees about data science and marketing.[2] She has given a keynote at Slush, talking about augmenting human capabilities.[11] She delivered a TED talk about humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.[11]

In 2017 she was included in the 100 Women (BBC).[12] She 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.[13] She was part of Biz journals 40 Under 40.[4][14] She is a mentor of the Katapult accelerator in Norway. She is part of the All-party parliamentary group on Artificial Intelligence.[15]