Research | Ishtiaque Ahmed

My research is centered on the idea of 'voice', which I define as an instrumental and constitutive means of development. My research is deeply concerned with the issues related to sustainability and social justice, and I am critical of the modernist, neoliberal, and capitalist approaches to those issues. Most of my research focuses on studying, analyzing, and designing computing technologies with marginalized populations around the world through this lens. I draw heavily on political philosophy, critical theory, social science, anthropology, and STS literature in my work. I design, develop, deploy, and evaluate technologies that connect theories from these disciplines to mobile and ubiquitous computing, natural language processing, social media, and machine learning. My research involves both theoretical depth and technical challenges.

Research Themes:

Responsible AI Annotation

I study responsible data annotation, the hidden labor that fuels today’s AI. My work asks core ethical questions: who does this work, under what conditions, and how do their cultural and material contexts shape the data that AI learns from? By centering the voices of annotators in the Global South, I explore how data infrastructures can be made more just, sustainable, and accountable. This research not only reveals the unseen foundations of AI but also reimagines how we might build technologies that truly reflect human values.

Reference papers: [FaccT '25]

Causal Gap in Ethical Reasoning

My research investigates how information gaps in training data create ethical blind spots in AI and large language models. By uncovering whose knowledge, histories, and voices are missing, I show how these absences shape bias, exclusion, and power in AI systems. This work aims not only to diagnose these gaps but also to design pathways for building models that are more inclusive, equitable, and reflective of our diverse world

Reference papers: [CHI '24]

AI, Ethics, and the "others"

Computing's historical emphasis on secular scientific rationality often sidelines the values of faith, culture, and emotion in people's health and financial activities. In this project, we question how we can think of a new kind of computational intelligence that emerges from the ethics and history of the people outside the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) domain.

Reference papers: [CHI '21] [CSCW '20] [GI '20] [CHI '19]

Gender, Identity, Harassment, and Social Justice

The objective of this project is to deepen our understanding of how social standards are reinforced by computing technologies, and develop emancipatory platforms for social justice. We are interested in a wide range of topics in this area ranging from gender-based violence and protest to madness and prostitution.

Reference papers: [CHI '21] [CSCW '21] [GROUP '20] [ASONAM '20] [CSCW '19] [ICTD '19] [LIMITS '16] [CHI '14]

Migration and Mobilities

Migration creates various tensions around a person's identity and political right, which are rooted in their communal memory and political reality. We investigate how these tensions are translated into computing, and build novel technologies to address these issues.

Reference papers: [Interaction '21], [CHI '20], [ICTD '20], [CHI EA '20], [COMPASS '19], [LIMITS '19], [CHI '15]

Privacy and Security in the Global South

The western definition of privacy is often confined within its liberal scope and democratic privilege, and hence is not applicable in many parts of the Global South. In this project, we explore how the idea of privacy changes in various cultures and contexts, and how we can design appropriate technology for them.

Reference papers: [ICTD '20], [COMPASS '20], [CHI '19], [CSCW '19] [CCS '19] [CSCW '18] [CHI '17] [IITD '17] [ICTD '16]

Repair, Recycle, and Electronic Waste

Computer Science education and research is often centered around designing a new technology, and the important practices the maintenance, repair, and recycling of those technology do not get focus there. However, those issues are often central to the issues of sustainability and justice. In this project, we study, design, and develop technologies to strengthen these post-use phases on computing technologies.

Reference papers: [COMPASS '21] [STE '20] [CHI '19] [CSCW '19] [ITID '17] [CHI '16] [ICTD '16] [ICTD '15] [DIS '14]