P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Ria conducts research, writes, speaks, and teaches to reveal how the rise of AI is shifting power. Weaving scientific and humanistic inquiry, her work confronts and nuances narratives that paint AI as a purely neutral, inscrutable, and authoritative technology. Rather, she looks beyond this veneer of neutrality, revealing that AI technologies are currently contributing to larger, overwhelmingly power-centralizing, neocolonial, and surveillant projects. In parallel, Ria cocreates and studies vibrant anti-oppressive convenings where communities at the margins are exploring when and how it becomes possible to take back this power. Ria is a queer, South-Asian womxn, with a name from a Telugu poem and a beautiful life in the Bay Area, near the ocean. The guiding aim of her work is to offer communities strategic and powerful maps for understanding, interacting with, dismantling, or transforming the nature of these technologies.

Ria has been awarded support by the Open Philanthropy Fellowship, the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and the MacArthur Foundation. Her work has been featured in Nature, the MIT Tech Review, national NIST reports, and many popular media outlets.