Designing for Responsible AI by Reducing Online Toxicity and Harassment

Online harassment is a major societal challenge that impacts multiple communities. Some members of the community, like female journalists and activists, bear significantly higher impact since their profession requires easy accessibility, transparency about their identity, and involves highlighting stories of injustice. In this talk, I will present 3 case studies: 1. Specialized Rater Pools as an improvement to the human-in-the-loop mechanism to improve toxicity classification done by ML models. 2. Harassment Manager as a tool designed and created in collaboration with civil society and social media platforms to empower targets of online harassment. 3. Authorship Feedback as a mechanism to help perpetrators self-reflect.

Tesh (Nitesh) Goyal leads research at the intersection of Generative AI and Responsible AI at Google DeepMind. At present, Tesh also serves on the ACM SIGCHI Steering Committee, and as an Adjunct Professor at NYU Computer Science Department. His work at Google has led to the launch of ML based tools like MakerSuite/AI Studio to democratize access of Generative AI to developers safely, Harassment Manager to empower targets of online harassment, and ML based moderation to reduce online toxic content production on platforms like OpenWeb. He received his education at University of California Berkeley/RWTH Aachen (Masters), and Cornell University (PhD). His academic research to empower hispanic immigrant children with language learning, and breaking biases in sensemaking for intelligence analysts has been supported by the German Govt. Fellowship, National Science Foundation, and MacArthur Genius Grant. Prior to Google, Tesh has been part of multiple research labs including Yahoo Labs, HP Labs, and Bloomberg. Tesh has published in top-tier HCI conferences/journals (CHI, CSCW, JASIST, ICTD, ICIC and Ubicomp/IMWUT) and received three best paper honorable mention awards (CHI 2023, CHI 2022, CSCW 2016). Tesh has served on the Organization Committee for ACM SIGCHI conferences multiple times including Technical Program Chair at CHI 2023, GDI Chair at CHI 2021, Doctoral Consortium Chair at IMX 2021, and D&I Lunch Chair at CHI 2018-2020.