Queer in AI @ NeurIPS 2025!

Important Dates

Poster Session: December 2nd: 6-9 PM PT, Hall C, San Diego Convention Center

Workshop: December 4th: 9 AM to 5 PM PT, Room upper 32AB, San Diego Convention Center

Social: December 4th: 7 PM to 11 PM PT

🌈 Mission

Queer in AI’s workshop and socials at NeurIPS 2025 aim to act as a gathering space for queer folks to build community and solidarity while enabling participants to learn about key issues and topics at the intersection of AI and queerness.

Workshop Schedule

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM Introduction to Queer in AI

9:30 AM - 11:10 AM Queer-Coded Tech - Presentations and Tech Demos

Estrannai.se

Lea (she/her) is currently a master's student in computer science with an interest in interdisciplinary but human-centered approaches to computing. In her free time, she places a research focus on personalized medicine, orphan drugs and practical steps to improve healthcare for trans people. As co-founder of WHSAH she aims to bridge the gap between community research, expert patient knowledge and institutionalized medicine.

alix is an independent researcher working within the trans DIY community. Their work investigates hormone therapy, pharmacokinetics, endocrinology, and transition-related questions long overlooked by institutional medicine and academia. They build models and tools, and curate historical and community-sourced data, with the goal of translating complex biology into practical knowledge for self-care. They are the creator of estrannaise and co-founder of the WHSAH Collective, a community-driven research initiative for trans people, by trans people. Their current focus is on tactical technical communication and the everyday realities of hormone use including variability in drug response, dosing strategies for under-researched and emergent compounds, and the limits of medical access. alix holds an MSc in theoretical physics and a PhD in machine learning and computational ecology. Their postdoctoral research spanned species distribution modelling, normalizing flows, Bayesian non-parametrics, and the development of methods for joint unsupervised clustering and metric learning in high-dimensional, sparse data.

Name Change Tool

Pranav A is a researcher at the University of Hamburg who works developing inclusive policies on a community and government levels. He is a co-founder of Queer in AI and advocated queer inclusive policies in many conferences. He has been the D&I chair of several conferences where he instituted key changes in inclusivity.

Quouch

Nora (she/her) is the founder of Quouch - a queer travel app, focusing on Couchsurfing, Hanging out and Coworking, which already exists in +80 countries. Nora has always been involved in various entrepreneurial projects, lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil for a few years and holds a degree in Cognitive Science. Currently, her and her startup Quouch are based in Berlin, Germany.

Queering The Map

Lucas LaRochelle is a designer, technologist and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.

11:10 AM - 12:30 PM Queer-Coded Tech - Panel

12:30 PM - 1:30 PM LUNCH BREAK

1:30 PM - 2:00 PM Sponsor Event

2:00 PM - 2:30 PM The Loving Grace of Machines: Queerness, Games and More-than-human Play - Dr. Merlyn Seller

Dr Merlyn Seller [she/her] is Lecturer and Coordinator of Design and Screen Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, and Gameworld Research Cluster co-lead at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research concern nonhuman, eco- and queer/trans game studies, with an interest in materialities, horror, affect and (post-)phenomenology in play. Recent publications include: ‘Genesis Noir and Cosmological Time: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang’ (in Unbound Queer Time, 2024) and ‘A Body Without End: The Trans Twine Games of Porpentine Charity Heartscape’ (Proceedings of the DiGRA International Conference – Playgrounds, 2024)

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM Dr. Alex Hanna

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. With Emily M. Bender, she also runs the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype for a live audience online on Twitch and her podcast.

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM How to be a queer researcher in the current political climate? - Fishbowl Panel

4:30 PM - 5:30 PM Global AI Initiatives - Panel

Accepted Submissions

Theories of "Sexuality" in Natural Language Processing Bias Research - Jacob Hobbs

Rainbow Noise: Stress-Testing Multimodal Harmful-Meme Detectors on LGBTQ Content - Ran Tong, Songtao Wei, Jiaqi Liu, Lanruo Wang

Situated Stories: Mapping Queer Ecologies through Participatory Data and Computational Methods - Lina Sophie Pfeiffer

Chained in the Rural-kin Structure: A Fairness Audit of DeepSeek in Drafting Indictment for Forced Marriage/Trafficking Cases involving Intellectually Disabled Women - Leah Sun

SLAyiNG: Towards Queer Language Processing - Leonor Veloso, Lea Hirlimann, Philipp Wicke, Hinrich Schuetze

Vision-Language Embeddings for Novelty Detection and Explanation: Active Learning for Safe Autonomous Driving - Ross Greer

Transfer Learning for Sarcasm-Enhanced Hate Speech Detection - Angelly Cabrera, Linus Lei, Antonio Ortega

Applying Failure Detection to LLM Anti-LGBTQ Bias Cases - Joshua Tint

Auditing Ancestry: Considering the Algorithmic Ecology of the Ancestry DNA Ethnicity Estimate - Kendall Clark

DIY Pharmacokinetics - alix, lea

Queer in AI @ NeurIPS 2025: Organizers

  • William Agnew (he/they) (william.agnew@ostem.org): William Agnew is a CBI postdoc fellow at CMU. His research covers AI ethics, participatory design, critiques of AI, queerness and AI, and resistance and AI. He received his PhD from University of Washington. His work had been recognized by three paper awards at FaccT and CHI, and covered by outlets including the Washington Post, Wired, and MIT Tech Review.

  • Franziska Sofia Hafner (she/her) (Franziska.Hafner@oii.ox.ac.uk): Sofia is a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, where she will be starting a PhD in October 2025. Her research lives at the intersection of Computer Science and Social Science, with a specific focus on algorithmic fairness.

  • Michelle Lin (she/her) (Michelle.lin2@mail.mcgill.ca) : Michelle is a Research Assistant and Masters student at the University of Montreal and Mila - Quebec AI Institute. Her research uses deep learning, remote sensing, and computer vision for climate change mitigation applications. At Queer in AI, she helps organize workshops and events.

  • Ankush Gupta (he/they) (ankushg0405@gmail.com): Ankush is a research assistant at the Centre for Human Centred Computing at IIIT-Delhi. He focuses his research on Human-Centred AI and edge computing. His research involves utilising deep learning and natural language processing to develop algorithms that improve human interaction and mitigate user biases to make AI systems more inclusive and effective.

  • Zhendong Li (he/they) (zhl923@lehigh.edu): Zhendong Li, is a second-year PhD student in the ISE department of Lehigh University and he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Shanghai University in 2023. His research interests mainly focus on optimal control problems governed by partial differential equations and saddle point systems.

  • Nikolay Malkin (they/any) (https://malkin1729.github.io) is a Chancellor's Fellow in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of CIFAR's Learning in Machines and Brains programme. Their research foci include probabilistic machine learning, generative models, and neurosymbolic methods for reasoning in language and formal systems. A mathematician by training and a Bayesian by conviction, they are committed to diversity-aware agent design and to challenging the perpetuation of all oppressive categories in science and beyond.