Roya Pakzad was a Data & Democracy Fellow from 2023 to 2024. She is a senior fellow at Mozilla Foundation as well as founder of Taraaz, a technology and human rights non-profit. Previously she held positions at Stanford University and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). With a background in electrical engineering and human rights, her expertise spans digital technologies, corporate accountability, and human rights-centered design. Born in Iran, she now resides in California and writes the newsletter Humane AI.

Pakzad is creating a benchmarking dataset and an open, web-based platform to evaluate AI language models that serve refugees and migrants in their native languages. While humanitarian organizations increasingly deploy AI chatbots to deliver life-saving information and services, there is a need for community-centered evaluation methods to adequately assess linguistic diversity, cultural nuance and trustworthiness for high-stakes humanitarian contexts.