Roya Pakzad

Experience

• 

  AMD

  Aug 2012 - Aug 2015

  ASIC Design Engineer

  Assisted in the Design for Testability (DFT) of AMD's Semi-Custom SoC (System on a Chip) for Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.

• 

  Columbia University in the City of New York

  Sept 2015 - Dec 2016

  As part of the Justice-in-Education initiative at Rikers Island jail, I conduct a Women’s Empowerment Workshop teaching computer skills, resume writing, and interview skills to young incarcerated women.

  • Justice-in-Education Program Instructor

    Feb 2016 - Dec 2016

  • Graduate Student Research Assistant

    Sept 2015 - Dec 2016
• 

  Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

  May 2018 - Jun 2019

  Research Associate and Project Leader, Technology and Human Rights

  I research human rights implications of new technologies at Stanford Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi). My current focus is mostly on social and human rights impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. To come up with impactful and practical digital policy, I see myself as a translator between technologists, human rights scholars, civil society groups, and government officials.

• 

  CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

  Sept 2019 - now

  Affiliated Scholar

  I serve as an affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley's CITRIS Policy Lab. The CITRIS Policy Lab's mission is to "support interdisciplinary technology policy research that encourages development and deployment of technology in the interest of society." Areas of research interest include computational propaganda, inclusive AI, and digital inclusion.

• 

  Taraaz

  Sept 2019 - now

  Founder and Director

  I'm the founder and director at Taraaz, a research and advocacy organization working at the intersection of Technology and Human Rights.At Taraaz, we work with civil society organizations, academic institutions, technology companies, and government agencies to carry out projects including:▫️ Conducting Human rights impacts assessments informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ methodology and other human-centric design principles. ▫️ Developing educational material and guiding tools to audit and evaluate human rights impacts of digital products and services and to mitigate potential adverse impacts.▫️ Producing cross-disciplinary research papers and policy reports on topics including but not limited to human rights implications of technical designs, the digital divide between and within countries, discriminatory outcomes of algorithmic decision making systems on vulnerable groups, and more.Our website: https://taraazresearch.org/ Show less

• 

  University of Virginia

  Aug 2023 - now

  Practitioner Fellow in Data and Democracy

  As a Practitioner Data and Democracy Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia, I will develop an open-source tool to enhance the transparency of US government AI procurement practices. The goal of this tool is to define transparency criteria, extract relevant procurement data, and enable more effective scrutiny of procurement practices, thus promoting transparency and accountability in public-private partnerships.