Malihe Alikhani is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. In an era of increasingly present AI, Alikhani is both enthused and wary of its transformative power. She believes in the ability of language technologies and AI to bolster critical education, health, and social justice efforts, but she also studies the ways in which they become biased. Her vision is to design inclusive and equitable language technologies that communicate effectively with diverse populations. By integrating insights from cognitive science, social sciences, and machine learning, these models can capture diversity of interpretation and benefit underserved communities.

Alikhani practices in the classroom what she preaches in her research, and strives to prepare a diverse generation of students to deploy the transformative power of AI. After three years as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, during which time she garnered a handful of “best paper” honors, she aims to build new collaborations within Northeastern’s Ethics Institute, the Institute for Experiential AI, and the Network Science Institute. Her work has been supported by DARPA, the NIH, Google, and Amazon, and her team is among the finalists of the second Amazon Alexa TaskBot Challenge.