Eminent technology experts from India named to new AI advisory body announced by UN Secretary-General

United Nations, October 27

Eminent technology experts hailing from India have been named to a new global advisory body announced by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to support the international community’s efforts to govern artificial intelligence.

The High-Level Multistakeholder Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, announced by the UN Chief here on Thursday, brings together experts from government, the private sector, the research community, civil society, and academia, and is focused on building a global scientific consensus on risks and challenges, helping harness AI for the Sustainable Development Goals, and strengthening international cooperation on AI governance, a statement said.

Among the members of the advisory body are the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill; co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation, a non-profit technology think-tank that has conceptualised India Stack, Health Stack, and other digital public goods, Sharad Sharma; and Lead Researcher at Hugging Face, India, Nazneen Rajani.

Addressing reporters here, Guterres said, “In our challenging times, AI could power extraordinary progress for humanity.

“From predicting and addressing crises to rolling out public health services and education services, AI could scale up and amplify the work of governments, civil society and the United Nations across the board,” he said.

Guterres noted that for developing economies, AI offers the possibility of leapfrogging outdated technologies and bringing services directly to people where needs are bigger and for the people who need them most.

Prior to his appointment as the Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology, Gill was the CEO of the International Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Research Collaborative (I-DAIR) project, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.

Previously, he was the Executive Director and Co-Lead of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (2018-2019).

Gill was India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva (2016-2018).

Sharma also co-founded Teltier Technologies, a wireless infrastructure start-up now part of CISCO. An active angel investor with over two dozen investments, he was instrumental in the success of India’s first IP-focused fund, the India Innovation Fund.      He is a member of the National Start-up Advisory Council, Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI) Financial and Regulatory Technology Committee and chairs the International Financial Services Centres Authority’s (IFSCA) Expert Committee on Asset Tokenisation and the Taskforce on Digital Public Infrastructure in the ThinkTank20 (T20) group of G20.

Rajani is the Research Lead at Hugging Face, specialising in AI Safety and Alignment, leveraging Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). She is recognised as an expert and thought leader in Large Language Models (LLMs) robustness and evaluation. Before her tenure at HuggingFace, Nazneen successfully led a team of esteemed researchers at Salesforce Research, dedicated to developing robust natural language generation systems built upon LLMs, according to her profile.

Rajani earned her Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the interpretability of Machine Learning models.

She has over 40 publications in premier conferences and her research has garnered significant attention from prominent media outlets.