Email: m.alikhani AT northeastern DOT edu
Malihe Alikhani (She/Her)
I am an assistant professor of AI and social justice at the Khoury School of Computer Science at Northeastern University. I am also a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute and the Institute for Experimental AI and a 3C fellow.
My research goal is to design inclusive and equitable language technologies. This involves developing systems that communicate effectively with diverse populations, especially those from underserved communities. By integrating insights from cognitive science and social sciences with machine learning, I design computational models that capture the diversity of interpretation and reflect the success of language as a communicative tool.
I aspire to discern and address biases in learning models, especially in applications such as education, health, and social justice. This aspiration has led me to collaborate with educators, healthcare experts, and community leaders to create inclusive technology-enabled experiences.
Current Projects
Inclusive Language Technologies for Positive Impact
AI-assisted moderation and mediation; harm measurement and ethics of social interactions with AI; oppressive practices & norms; pragmatics of harmful speech
Equitable and Robust Language Technologies
Studying generalization and robustness of NLP models using the tools of learning theory; designing theoretical machine learning frameworks for NLP tasks such as language generation and dialogue management
Collaborative Conversational AI for Education and Health
Modeling collaboration as shared meaning construction; Grounding, and generation
Sign Language Processing
Sign language understanding and generation; designing interactive AI systems for signers with applications in healthcare and education.
