NeurIPS 2026 Social Event

The Human Context of AI:
Whose Perspective Counts?

An interactive evening of conversation, collaboration, and networking on how languages, cultures, and values shape the way we understand and build AI.

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In-Person Social @ NeurIPS 2026 · Sydney, Australia
About the Social

This social event will explore the human and cultural context of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on whose languages, values, and perspectives are represented in the AI systems we build and whose are still missing. The event will foster critical and interactive discussion around how AI understands people across different linguistic, cultural, and social contexts, and what can be missed when diverse perspectives are not adequately represented. Through facilitated discussions, interactive challenges, and community networking, participants will exchange experiences, question assumptions, and explore how different perspectives can shape the development of more inclusive and culturally grounded AI. Our goal is to bring together researchers, practitioners, students, and community members from diverse disciplines, regions, and backgrounds to build connections, broaden perspectives, and collectively reflect on whose voices should help shape the future of AI.

Event Schedule

7:00 – 7:05 pm

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Necva Bölücü
7:05 – 7:50 pm

Panel Discussion: “Whose Perspective Counts in AI?”

30-minute panel followed by 15 minutes of audience Q&A

Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people communicate, access information, learn and participate in society. However, as these technologies become more integrated into everyday life, important questions arise about whose perspectives, experiences, languages and values are represented in the systems being developed, and whose are overlooked.

This session will examine the human, ethical and societal dimensions of AI development, with attention to representation, inclusion, responsibility and accountability. It will explore how well current AI systems serve different linguistic and cultural communities, the ethical considerations surrounding the data used to develop them, and the extent to which AI technologies reflect the diversity of the people they are designed to serve.

The discussion will also consider the role of human values in AI development, including questions of trust, safety, fairness and governance. Bringing together perspectives from AI ethics, natural language processing, human-AI interaction, multilingual technologies and responsible AI, the session will examine the relationship between technological progress and its broader human implications.

7:50 – 8:55 pm

Community Networking and Round-Table Discussion

8:55 – 9:00 pm

Closing Remarks

Panel

Meet the Panelists

Aditya Joshi

Aditya Joshi

Aditya Joshi

Dr. Aditya Joshi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He heads the natural language processing (NLP) research group that specialises in NLP for language variation, grounded in the human context of linguistic diversity. His NLP research since 2011 has resulted in 3900+ citations and a textbook of NLP.
Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney
Sunayana Sitaram

Sunayana Sitaram

Sunayana Sitaram

Sunayana Sitaram is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. Her work focuses on the evaluation of AI systems across languages, cultures, and real-world contexts. Her research spans multilingual and multicultural evaluation, community-based evaluation, AI safety, and the validity of AI-based evaluation methods. At IISc, she leads the Center for AI Evaluation to advance a rigorous, independent science of evaluation for AI systems with a focus on under-represented languages, cultures and contexts. Prior to joining IISc, Sunayana spent 11 years at Microsoft Research India as a Post Doctoral Researcher, Senior Researcher and Principal Researcher (L66). At Microsoft Research, Sunayana served as the director of the MSR India Research Fellow program (2022-2024), which exposes bright young researchers to a world-class research environment and prepares them for careers in research, engineering and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining MSRI as a Post Doc Researcher in 2016, Sunayana completed her MS and PhD at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. Sunayana’s research has been published in top NLP and ML conferences including ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, Interspeech, ICASSP and she regularly serves in the program committee of these conferences. She has organized special sessions and workshops on under-resourced languages, code-switching, multilingual evaluation and speech for social good. She has also led the creation of several benchmarks and datasets that have been used by research groups all over the world.
Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Science
Jey Han Lau

Jey Han Lau

Associate Professor at The University of Melbourne
TBA

To Be Announced

Panelist
Who Should Attend

The Social is designed for the broader NeurIPS community rather than a specialised technical audience. Its focus on people, communication, language, and culture makes it accessible to researchers and practitioners across fields, as well as students and early-career researchers. We welcome attendees from diverse geographic, disciplinary, linguistic, cultural, and professional backgrounds, with most of the evening dedicated to meaningful conversation, shared experiences, and connections among participants.

Fields We Would Love to See

Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Speech Technology Human-Computer Interaction Responsible AI Responsible NLP Data and Models Human-Centered AI Computer Vision Robotics Generative AI
Represented Organizations

Organizers

Joy Olusanya

Joy Olusanya

Organizer
Founder & CEO at CLRLC
Necva Bölücü

Necva Bölücü

Co-Organizer
Research Scientist at CSIRO
Bonaventure Dossou

Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Co-Organizer
McGill University & Mila
Contact

Get in Touch

For inquiries, please contact: joynaomiolusanya@gmail.com

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