US-based Khoja resident Nazneen Rajani has been selected as a member of the AI Advisory Board to the UN’s Secretary General.
Who is Nazneen Rajani?
Nazneen Rajani, a US resident born and raised in India, is a mother of 2. She holds a Ph. D in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, with her research focusing on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the interpretability of Machine Learning models.
Qualifications and Work Experience
After her Ph. D., she started as a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce Research, working on commonsense reasoning and interpretability in NLP. She led a small team focused on building robust natural language generation models. She then joined as a research lead at Hugging Face, a startup competing with OpenAI, specialising in AI Safety and Alignment and leveraging Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). She is recognised as an expert and thought leader in large language models’ (LLMs) robustness and evaluation.
Nazneen is the founder and CEO of Collinear AI, a startup focused on building solutions for enterprises to evaluate language models and finetune them for the objectives they care about, such as performance, safety, consistency, etc.
She advocates for women’s education and has mentored girls and women in STEM throughout her career. She has also taught classes and lectures on AI and ML topics.
What was the driving force behind selecting AI as a Career?
She says her father used to talk a lot about AI while we were growing up, and he advised her to consider it while she was doing her undergrad. This was the founding stone of her interest in the field. During her undergrad at BITS, she took two elective courses in AI. One was Introduction to AI, with textbooks written by pioneers Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, and another was on Neural Networks. For the neural network class, she implemented a neural network that played a tic-tac-toe game for an NxN board. This was her first ever paper at the age of 20 which was published at the IEEE conference. Thereafter, her curiosity kept increasing, and she took several classes in ML, including data mining, natural language processing, statistical machine learning, linear algebra, etc., during her master’s at UT Austin.
Nazneen is credited with authoring /co-authoring around 95 articles, of which over 40 are published in premier conferences, and her research has garnered significant attention from prominent media outlets.
In September 2023, Nazneen featured in an article that was published by the New York Times, a leading newspaper in the US. The article talked about how AI companies were enhancing their bots using data fed by well-educated workers.
Were there any Challenges She faced?
When talking with our team, Nazneen mentioned that she faced a few challenges growing in her career, especially being a minority in a very male-dominated profession and industry. In one of the recent instances, “I was fundraising for my current startup, Collinear AI, and I wanted to raise venture capital to hire and build a product for enterprise LLMs. It took longer and more work than I expected, and my friends from similar backgrounds raised a lot more with much less diligence just because they fit the image of a Western CEO better than I (did). But Alhamdulillah, I have been relying on Allah (SWT), and we were able to close the seed round of $6.7Mn with a very high valuation. For context, only about 0.05% of startups are able to raise Venture capital and those who do only 2% of them are women founded.”
Selection in the AI Advisory Body of the UN’s Secretary General
Distinguished technology experts have been appointed to a newly established global Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, announced by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. This High-Level Multistakeholder body brings together experts from government, the private sector, the research community, civil society, and academia. The goal of this body is to work on findings and recommendations on interoperability of AI and advise the UN SG on the opportunities and risks associated with AI while involving all the stakeholders and voices, especially those from the Global South.
On being selected as a part of the AI Advisory Body, Nazneen commented, “It is definitely one of my top 3 achievements. I did not expect to be selected to serve as an AI advisor to the UN’s SG — it is a big responsibility. I feel honoured and humbled that I can contribute towards shaping global AI governance.”
The Khoja News team congratulates Nazneen Rajani on this spectacular accomplishment, and we pray to Allah (SWT) to grant her success in all her endeavours, Ameen.
References:
