Farhan Samir, PhD

I'm an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. I'm part of the DGP Group in the Department of Computer Science. I earned my PhD at the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group at the University of British Columbia . My research there was also supported by NSERC and UBC’s Public Scholars Initiative. I also spent some time at the University of Washington NLP group. I was also a research intern at Ai2 Aristo, NVIDIA, and Amazon’s Lab126 in each summer term of my PhD program.

The overarching theme of my research is to make information ecosystems and technologies more pluralistic, so they are inclusive of voices that have been historically marginalized. To this end, I develop quantitative measures that measure representational gaps in diverse contexts, from entrenched biases in conversational AI systems, to content gaps in large-scale information management systems, to representational gaps in news coverage. These measures are informed by studies and methods from humanistic inquiry, including critical discourse analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, to ensure maximal ecological validity. My work is equally dedicated to a high degree of construct validity, grounded in my training in machine learning and data science.