Rumman Chowdhury


Rumman Chowdhury is a Bengali American data scientist and the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Lead at Accenture.

Education and early career

Chowdhury was born in Rockland County, New York. Her parents are Bangladeshi immigrants. She enjoyed watching science fiction and attributes her curiosity about science to the Dana Scully effect. She completed her undergraduate study in management science and political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined Columbia University for her postgraduate study in statistics and quantitative methods. She holds a doctorate in political science from University of California, San Diego. She is interested in how data can be used to understand people's bias and ways to evaluate the impact of technology on humanity. She finished her PhD whilst working in Silicon Valley.

Career

Chowdhury taught data science at the boot camp Metis and worked at Quotient before joining Accenture in 2017. She leads their work on responsible artificial intelligence. She is concerned about the AI workforce; particularly on retaining researchers. She is also concerned about algorithmic bias. She has spoken openly about the need to define what ethical AI actually means. She works with companies on developing ethical governance and algorithms that explain their decisions transparently. She is determined to use AI to improve diversity in recruitment. Chowdhury, alongside a team of early career researchers at the Alan Turing Institute, developed a Fairness Tool which scrutinises the data that is input to an algorithm and identifies whether certain genders may influence the outcome. The tool both identifies and tries to fix bias, enabling organisations to make more fair decisions. She designed All.ai, a language analysis tool that can monitor and improve the gender balance of speakers in meetings.
She launched X Institute, a program which teaches refugees about data science and marketing. She has given a keynote at Slush, talking about augmenting human capabilities. She delivered a TED talk about humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.
In 2017 she was included in the 100 Women. She has written for Forbes and serves on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Wellbeing Metrics Standards for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems working group. She was part of Biz journals 40 Under 40. She is a mentor of the Katapult accelerator in Norway. She is part of the All-party parliamentary group on Artificial Intelligence.