About Taraaz
📏 WHAT WE DO
In Farsi, a taraaz is a tool for achieving balance. Our work in the domain of technology and human rights is much the same. We research human rights implications of digital technologies and turn them into practical tools, guidelines, and policy proposals to better inform technologists and other public and private entities in the design, development, and deployment of their products and services.
📝 WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?
We work with civil society organizations, academic institutions, technology companies, and government agencies to carry out projects including:
Conducting Human rights impacts assessments informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ methodology and other human-centric design principles.
Developing educational material and guiding tools to audit and evaluate human rights impacts of digital products and services and to mitigate potential adverse impacts.
Producing cross-disciplinary research papers and policy reports on topics including but not limited to human rights implications of technical designs, the digital divide between and within countries, discriminatory outcomes of algorithmic decision making systems on vulnerable groups, and more.
🔎 Who we are
Taraaz is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 85-4250521) based in Santa Cruz, California.
Roya Pakzad is the founder and director of Taraaz. She is also the 2023-24 Practitioner Data and Democracy Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia and an affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab. Her work centers on researching human rights implications of digital technologies, corporate accountability, and human rights-centered design.
Previously, she served as a Research Associate and Project Leader in Technology and Human Rights at Stanford University’s Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi). She also worked with Stanford’s program in Iranian Studies on the role of information and communication technologies and human rights in Iran. Prior to entering the human rights field, Roya was an electrical engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). She holds degrees from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran (B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering), the University of Southern California (M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering) and Columbia University (M.A. in Human Rights Studies).
Roya’s work has been featured in news and press outlets including Wired, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, and Reuters. It has also been recognized by various awards and fellowships from esteemed institutions such as the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Meta, and Twitter Engineering.
She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Santa Cruz, California.