Our Team

Mission

Queer in AI’s mission is to raise awareness of queer issues in AI/ML, foster a community of queer researchers and celebrate the work of queer scientists. We use “queer” as an umbrella term for people with diverse non-normative sexual orientations, romantic orientations, and/or genders, corresponding to acronyms like LGBTQIA2S+. We also explicitly include those questioning their identities.

Queer in AI was established by queer scientists in AI with the mission to make the AI community a safe and inclusive place that welcomes, supports, and values LGBTQIA2S+ people. We work towards this aim by building a visible community of queer AI scientists through conference workshops, social meetups, conference poster sessions, mentoring programs, graduate application financial aid, and many other initiatives. Another crucial part of our mission is to raise awareness of queer issues in the general AI community and to encourage and highlight research on and solutions to these problems.

Queer in AI’s demographic survey reveals that most queer scientists in our community do not feel completely welcome in conferences or their work environments, with the main reasons being a lack of queer community and role models. Over the past years, Queer in AI has worked towards eliminating these issues, yet the voices of minoritized queer communities, especially transgender, non-binary folks and queer BIPOC folks have still been neglected. Our aim is to highlight issues that these communities face and work with communities to make spaces more inclusive of queer folks.

Contact us

To reach out to admins, please email us at queerinai [at] gmail [dot] com. Please don't send event invites, job opportunities and calls to this email. They should be sent to the mailing list or slack instead.

If you want to send event / speaker invites, advertise call for papers or job opportunities, please send them to queerai [at] googlegroups [dot] com. Priority will be given to those organizations who have supported Queer in AI by sponsoring, donating or volunteering.

Core Organizers

  • Pranav (he/they)

    Pranav is a brown queer Asian chaotic zoomer who is a research engineer at Dayta AI, Hong Kong. At QueerInAI, he organizes social events in NLP conferences, mentors volunteers and sets up DEI and safety initiatives.

    Website: pranav-a.github.io

  • Ti

    Ti is a research fellow at Aalto University, Finland, with research interests from probabilistic modelling and decision-making under uncertainty via transparent/interpretable models and visualizations to applications such as in healthcare, bio and earth sciences. At Queer in AI, Ti organized the first fully-virtual workshop at ICML 2020, is supporting members in cases of conflict or any other concerns, and helps out wherever else is needed.

  • Claas (he/him)

    Claas is a PhD student at the University of Toronto where he tries to find out why reinforcement learning is so hard. For Queer in AI, he organized workshops and events at various conferences.

    Twitter: @c_voelcker

  • Danica (she/they)

    Danica is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii, working on representation learning and statistical learning theory. At Queer in AI, she helps organize events at AI conferences and to improve trans-inclusive policies.

  • Hetvi

    Hetvi is a grad student in AI and is primarily interested in understanding biological systems using mathematics & CS.

    Twitter: @vuisnotabot

  • Ashwin (they/them)

    Ashwin is a queer bahujan activist and researcher in algorithmic fairness and AI ethics. They served as the first DEI Admin for Queer In AI and are currently pursuing graduate studies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. They help organize research and policy initiatives at Queer In AI.

    Twitter: @_ashwxn

  • Sharvani (she/her)

    Sharvani is a software engineer at Microsoft - she received her BS in computer science from UCLA in 2021 and co-founded QWER Hacks. At Queer in AI, she works on organizing workshops + graphic design / publicity + supporting undergraduates.

    Twitter: @sharvanilla

  • Maria Leonor (ML) Pacheco (she/her)

    Maria is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she leads the Boulder Language and Social Technologies group. At Queer in AI, she helps organize events and workshops at NLP conferences.

  • Arjun Subramonian (they/them)

    Arjun is a brown queer neurodivergent PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their research focuses on critical and theoretical understandings of fair graph learning and modes of LGBTQIA+ participation in AI more broadly. They help organize Queer in AI workshops and advocacy.

    Twitter: @arjunsubgraph

  • Sabine Weber (they/them)

    Sabine is a queer person who just finished their PhD at the University of Edinburgh. They are interested in multilingual NLP, AI ethics, science communication and art. They organized Queer in AI socials and were one of the Social Chairs at NAACL 2021. They also write the Queer in AI blog.

  • Raj Korpan (he/him)

    Raj is a gay New Yorker and an Assistant Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His research is in artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and machine learning. Currently, he is focused on socially aware robot navigation and explainable AI. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of New York. He has co-organized Queer in AI events at AI conferences, such as AAAI and AAMAS, and co-founded Queer in Robotics.

  • Andrea Sipos (she/her)

    Andrea is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Robotics at the University of Michigan whose research centers tactile feedback. She is a co-founder of Queer in Robotics.

  • Luca Soldaini (they/them)

    Luca is a queer researcher working on Natural Language Processing (NLP); currently, they are a research scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). At Queer In AI, they work on socials and workshops planning for NLP conferences, scholarship programs, and sponsors relations.

    Twitter: @soldni

  • Maria Ryskina (she/they)

    Maria is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Her research interests include computational linguistics, NLP, cognitive science, and neuroscience. At Queer in AI, they help organize workshops and socials at NLP conferences and run the Graduate Application Aid Program, which supports queer scholars pursuing careers in STEM.

    Twitter: @maria_ryskina

  • Shane Storks (he/him)

    Shane is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan working on commonsense reasoning in NLP and embodied interactive agents. At Queer in AI, he helps organize workshops and socials for NLP conferences.

  • Nathan Dennler (he/they)

    Nathan is a queer Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California working on personalization and customization in human-robot interaction. Nathan helps organize different workshops and gatherings for Queer in AI.

  • Alissa Valentine (she/they)

    Alissa is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC working on “fairness in precision psychiatry” projects using NLP and EHR. Alissa is an organizer for Queer in AI workshops, socials, mentorship, and loves to help with sticker/swag design.

  • Amanda Bertsch (she/her)

    Amanda is a Ph.D. student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, working on natural language generation. At Queer in AI, she helps organize workshops and events at NLP conferences.

  • Martin Mundt (he/they)

    Martin is an independent group leader at hessian.AI & visiting professor at TU Darmstadt with a research focus on lifelong learning and dynamic machine learning workflows. Martin has served as diversity & inclusion chair at AAAI-24 and helps to organize Queer in AI activities.

  • Carter Buckner (he/him)

    Carter is a PhD student at the University of Arkansas working on privacy and interpretability in machine learning. Carter helps organize socials and conference events for Queer in AI.