NeurIPS 2020

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Policy Panel

Roya Pakzad · Dia Kayyali · Marzyeh Ghassemi · Shakir Mohamed · Mohammad Norouzi · Ted Pedersen · Anver Emon · Abubakar Abid · Darren Byler · Samhaa R. El-Beltagy · Nayel Shafei · Mona Diab

Tue Dec 08 10:00 AM -- 10:30 AM (PST) @

in Muslims in ML »

In this short talk, Roya Pakzad will speak about her current project entitled "Nuanced Counter-Narratives of Being Muslim Online." The goal of this project is to gain a deeper understanding of how marginalized groups create counter-narratives, who amplifies them, how sustainable they are, and how their impact differs. By providing various examples, she will also touch on how technology companies' business models and their third-party relationships impact Muslims and people from Muslim-majority countries. The talk will conclude with recommendations for design and policy interventions.

The workshop will conclude with a discussion with authors and organizers.

Author Information

Roya Pakzad (Taraaz)

Dia Kayyali (UC Hastings College of the Law)

Marzyeh Ghassemi (University of Toronto, Vector Institute)

Shakir Mohamed (DeepMind)

Shakir Mohamed is a senior staff scientist at DeepMind in London. Shakir's main interests lie at the intersection of approximate Bayesian inference, deep learning and reinforcement learning, and the role that machine learning systems at this intersection have in the development of more intelligent and general-purpose learning systems. Before moving to London, Shakir held a Junior Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), based in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia with Nando de Freitas. Shakir completed his PhD with Zoubin Ghahramani at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar to the United Kingdom. Shakir is from South Africa and completed his previous degrees in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Mohammad Norouzi (Google Brain)

Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth)

Ted Pedersen is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. His research interests are in Natural Language Processing and most recently are focused on computational humor and identifying hate speech. His research has previously been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award.

Anver Emon (University of Toronto)

Anver M. Emon is a professor of law and history at the University of Toronto, specializing in Islamic legal history. He is also the director of the University's Institute of Islamic Studies

Abubakar Abid (Stanford)

Darren Byler (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Samhaa R. El-Beltagy (Newgiza University)

Samhaa R. El-Beltagy is a Professor of Computer Science and the Dean of the School of Information Technology at Newgiza University. She’s also an NLP R&D consultant for Optomatica (a company dedicated to the development of AI solutions to real-life complex problems), as well as a co-founder of AIM Technologies (an NLP start-up), and a member of the technical board for the National Council for AI in Egypt. Prof. El-Beltagy’s primary research area is in Arabic NLP, but her research interests include AI and NLP at large.

Nayel Shafei (Marefa)

Nayel Shafei graduated from Cairo University (BS 1981), MIT (SM ’86, PhD. ’90 in Machine learning). Worked in CAD/CAM, telecommunication. Founded a company for Fiber-optic telecom. Established (2007) Marefa.org, largest Arabic-language encyclopedia. 6.5 million visitors a month.