Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh

Senior Program Manager

AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether)

Microsoft

About Forough.

Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh is a Senior Program Manager in Aether (AI, ethics, and effects in engineering and research -- part of the Office of Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft), where she works closely with the Office of Resposible AI on sensitive uses of AI and supports internal teams in implementing responsible AI. Forough's research background lies at the intersection and interaction of society, people, and AI and natural language systems. Her work examines how people create and explore datasets, train machine learning models, and make decisions with machine learning systems. Before starting this position, Forough was a postdoctoral researcher in the computational social science and FATE groups at MSR-NYC.

Beyond research, Forough has been interested and active with efforts on diversity and inclusion in computing. In 2019, she was a co-organizer of the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop at NeurIPS.

Forough holds a PhD in computer science with a focus on human-centered machine learning from University of Colorado Boulder and a BE in computer engineering from University of Tehran.

Publications.

  • Aligning Offline Metrics and Human Judgments of Value of AI-Pair Programmers
    Victor Dibia, Adam Fourney, Gagan Bansal, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Han Liu, Saleema Amershi.
    [Under review], 2022

  • Manipulating and Measuring Model Interpretability
    Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Daniel G. Goldstein, Jake M. Hofman, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach.
    CHI, 2021 (A shorter version appeared at the NIPS workshop on Transparent and Interpretable Machine Learning in Safety Critical Environments, 2017)

  • Responsible computing during COVID-19 and beyond
    Solon Barocas, Asia J. Biega, Margarita Boyarskaya, Kate Crawford, Hal Daumé III, Miroslav Dudík, Benjamin Fish, Mary L. Gray, Brent Hecht, Alexandra Olteanu, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Luke Stark, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Marion Zepf.
    Communications of the ACM (CACM), 2021

  • Expanding the scope of reproducibility research through data analysis replications
    Jake M. Hofman, Daniel G.Goldstein, Siddhartha Sen, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh.
    WWW workshop on Innovative Ideas in Data Science, 2020

  • A Human in the Loop is Not Enough: The Need for Human-Subject Experiments in Facial Recognition
    Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Samira Samadi, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach.
    CHI workshop on Human-Centered Approaches to Fair and Responsible AI, 2020

  • Attending to the Problem of Uncertainty in Current and Future Health Wearables
    Bran Knowles, Alison Smith-Renner, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Di Lu, Halimat Alabi.
    Communications of the ACM (CACM), 2018

  • Evaluating Visual Representations for Topic Understanding and Their Effects on Manually Generated Labels
    Alison Smith, Tak Yeon Lee, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Leah Findlater, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Niklas Elmqvist.
    Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2017

  • ALTO: Active Learning with Topic Overviews for Speeding Label Induction and Document Labeling
    Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Leah Findlater, Kevin Seppi.
    Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2016
  • (Code publicly available, now being used by Snagajob)

  • Human-Centered and Interactive: Expanding the Impact of Topic Models
    Alison Smith, Tak Yeon Lee, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Niklas Elmqvist, Kevin Seppi, Leah Findlater.
    CHI wokrshop on Human-Centered Machine Learning, 2016

  • Computer-Assisted Content Analysis: Topic Models for Exploring Multiple Subjective Interpretations
    Jason Chuang, John D. Wilkerson, Rebecca Weiss, Dustin Tingley, Brandon M. Stewart, Margaret E. Roberts, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Justin Grimmer, Leah Findlater, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Jeffrey Heer.
    NIPS Workshop on Human-Propelled Machine Learning, 2014

  • On Clustering Heterogeneous Networks
    Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh and Ananth Kalyanaraman.
    SIAM Workshop on Network Science, 2013

  • Design and Empirical Evaluation of Interactive and Interpretable Machine Learning
    Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh
    University of Colorado Boulder, 2018
  • Contact

    fpoursabzi AT microsoft DOT com