Rumman Chowdhury
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Rumman Chowdhury (born April 1, 1980) is an American data scientist and social scientist known for her work in responsible AI, algorithmic auditing, and the study of algorithmic bias. She is the founder and chief executive of Humane Intelligence, an organization that builds community-driven evaluations of artificial intelligence systems, and in 2024 she was named a United States Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence, joining the first all-female cohort in the program's history. [1][2][3]
Chowdhury is widely regarded as a pioneer of applied AI ethics and algorithmic accountability. She built the responsible-AI practice at the consultancy Accenture, founded the audit startup Parity, and led the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team at Twitter, where she ran what is generally described as the technology industry's first algorithmic bias bounty. After leaving Twitter during Elon Musk's 2022 acquisition, she co-organized the largest public generative AI red-teaming exercise held to that point, an event at DEF CON 2023 that was backed by the White House. [1][4][6]
Chowdhury was born on April 1, 1980, in Rockland County, New York, and is of Bangladeshi descent. [1] She earned undergraduate degrees in management science and political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then a Master of Science in quantitative methods of the social sciences from Columbia University. [1][2] She completed a PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego, in 2017; her dissertation, "Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Impact of the Metropolitan-Military Complex," examined the economic geography of defense spending. [1] Chowdhury finished her doctorate while already working in industry, having taught data science at the bootcamp Metis and held an earlier role at the firm Quotient. [1]
In 2017, Chowdhury joined Accenture, where she became global lead for responsible AI within the company's Applied Intelligence unit. [1][2] There she built one of the first enterprise responsible-AI practices and led development of a "Fairness Tool," an instrument created with researchers connected to the Alan Turing Institute to detect and help mitigate bias in algorithmic decision systems. [1] In 2020, she left to found Parity, a startup that built software for algorithmic auditing and aimed to bridge the translation gap between the risk, legal, and data-science teams responsible for governing AI inside organizations. [1]
Chowdhury joined Twitter in February 2021 as director of the company's Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team, a group charged with studying the effects of the platform's machine learning systems and making them more transparent. [1][10] Under her leadership, META published research on the algorithmic amplification of political content and on racial and gender bias in Twitter's image-cropping, or saliency, algorithm, work that contributed to the company scaling back automated photo cropping. [1][6]
In the summer of 2021, Chowdhury and product lead Jutta Williams ran the industry's first algorithmic bias bounty, modeled on the security world's bug bounties. [6] Hosted through the DEF CON AI Village, the competition gave researchers access to Twitter's open-sourced saliency model and invited them to demonstrate harms it could produce; the top prize went to a researcher who showed that the algorithm favored faces that were younger, slimmer, and lighter-skinned. [6] Chowdhury's META team was eliminated in November 2022 amid the layoffs that followed Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, an episode that drew wide attention to the dismantling of the company's ethics and trust-and-safety functions. [1]
In 2022, Chowdhury founded Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit that builds a community of practice around independent evaluation, red-teaming, and bias bounties for AI models. [2][9] The organization frames algorithmic auditing as a collaborative exercise that brings together technical researchers, domain experts, and affected communities to stress-test machine learning systems and the datasets behind them. [9]
Humane Intelligence drew international attention in August 2023 when it co-organized the Generative Red Team (GRT) Challenge at DEF CON 31 in Las Vegas, together with the AI Village and the nonprofit SeedAI. [4][5] Announced by the Biden administration and supported by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the event was the largest public generative AI red-teaming exercise held to that point: more than 2,000 participants probed large language models supplied by eight companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Hugging Face, Nvidia, Stability AI, and Cohere, hunting for flaws, harmful outputs, and embedded bias. [4][5] The exercise helped shape later US and international policy discussion of independent, third-party AI safety evaluation. [4]
In the years that followed, Humane Intelligence ran a series of bias bounty challenges, several funded by Google.org, that examined real-world AI systems for discriminatory behavior. [9] In 2025, Chowdhury stepped back from day-to-day leadership of the nonprofit to launch a related public benefit corporation, also called Humane Intelligence, that commercializes AI evaluation services. [2][9] She became chief executive of the new entity while continuing as a distinguished advisor to the nonprofit, where Mala Kumar was named interim executive director on August 1, 2025. [9]
On March 13, 2024, the U.S. Department of State named Chowdhury one of four U.S. Science Envoys for 2024, designating her the program's envoy for artificial intelligence. [3][7] The 2024 group, which also included plasma physicist Stephanie Diem, astronaut and geoscientist Sian Proctor, and oceanographer Dawn Wright, was the first all-female cohort in the history of the Science Envoy program, a State Department initiative begun in 2009 to deepen international scientific cooperation. [3][7] In the role, Chowdhury worked to advance global collaboration on AI governance and to promote ethical and inclusive approaches to the technology, engaging with governments, civil society, and researchers abroad. [3][7]
Chowdhury has been recognized across journalism, business, and public-interest technology. The BBC named her to its 100 Women list in 2017, and in 2018 Forbes included her among "Five Who Are Shaping AI" while the San Francisco Business Times named her to its 40 Under 40. [1][2] In 2023, Time magazine named her to its inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. [8] She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a responsible-AI fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a board member of the Oxford Internet Institute, and co-editor-in-chief of the Cambridge Forum on AI. [2][10]
| Year | Recognition |
|---|---|
| 2017 | BBC 100 Women [1] |
| 2018 | Forbes, "Five Who Are Shaping AI" [1] |
| 2018 | San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 [2] |
| 2023 | Time 100 Most Influential People in AI [8] |
| 2024 | U.S. Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence, first all-female cohort [3] |
As of 2026, Chowdhury leads the Humane Intelligence public benefit corporation, continues to advise the Humane Intelligence nonprofit, and remains one of the most prominent advocates for independent, third-party evaluation of AI systems. [2][9]