Inioluwa Deborah Raji

Hi! I’m a researcher at UC Berkeley interested in algorithmic auditing. I am currently an Academic Fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and was formerly a Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. I’ve worked closely with industry, civil society and within academia to push forward various projects to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning practice, and push forward benchmarking and model evaluation norms in the field. I work on various topics related to the legal and institutional accountability required for machine learning systems to be deployed safely. More specifically, I’m interested in (1) how model engineering choices (from evaluation to data choices in model development) impact model behaviour and outcomes in deployment, (2) how different stakeholders participate in, interpret and make use of measurements of machine learning model performance in deployment (3) what this means in terms of consumer protection, product liability, procurement, anti-discrimination practice and other forms of legal and institutional accountability related to functional harms.

I am on the advisory boards for the Center for Democracy and Technology AI Governance Lab, the Health AI Partnership, TeachAI, REALML and the Center for Civil Rights and Technology, and others. For my efforts, I’ve been named to Forbes 30 Under 30, MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35 Innovators and the TIME 100 Most Influential in AI, am the recipient of the 2024 Tech For Humanity Prize, and the 2024 Mozilla Rise 25 award, as well as the co-recipient of the EFF Pioneer Barlow Award with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. I received my Bachelors of Applied Science in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and am currently completing my PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

My work applies to a broad range of machine learning deployments — including automated decision systems, recommendation systems, and large pre-trained models.

My interests operate at the intersection of law and policy, applied economics and computer science.