About Taraaz

 

⚖️ mission

Our mission is to integrate human rights frameworks into technology design, development, and deployment. We equip technologists, policymakers, and civil society with the capacity, training, tools, and research needed to anticipate impacts, prevent harm, and ensure technology creates positive impact while respecting rights.

🕊️ vision

We envision a future where technology is understood as a socio-technical system — where human rights, equity, and technical design intersect. Developers and decision-makers integrate rights-based considerations at every stage, ensuring digital systems advance dignity, accountability, and justice.

📝 Activities & Services

  • Human Rights Due Diligence: Rigorous evaluations of technology and AI systems using international human rights frameworks, combining technical expertise and testing to identify risks and opportunities

  • Tool and Method Development: Evaluation frameworks, adversarial testing & red teaming methods, auditing tools, and documentation practices for AI and digital systems

  • Applied Research and Policy Guidance: Cross-disciplinary research on AI safety & governance, digital trust and safety, digital divides, public-private partnerships, and more.

  • Capacity Building and Training: Workshops, curricula, and educational materials for practitioners working on AI and digital technology systems

  • Advisory and Technical Assistance: Working with organizations to integrate human rights considerations into AI development and governance practices

👩🏻‍💻 About our Founder

Roya Pakzad is the founder and director of Taraaz. She is also a senior fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation 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 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. She also worked as the project leader and research associate at Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi) and 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.

Roya Pakzad’s other selected advisory roles include:

  • Advisory Council Member at Open Technology Fund (OTF) | Current

  • Advisor at Meta's Actor & Behavior Expert Circle | Current

  • Advisor at Meta’s AI Expert Advisory Roundtable (AI EAR)

  • Member of IEEE Standards Association's Artificial Intelligence Procurement Working Group P3119

  • Advisor at the Generative AI Red Team Challenge at DEFCON 31

  • Commissioner for the Prevention of Violence Against Women, City of Santa Cruz

  • Committee Member, ACM FAccT Conference (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Socio-technical Systems)

CV | LinkedIn | Newsletter

✉️ rpakzad@taraazresearch.org

📜 Legal Status

Taraaz is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 85-4250521) based in Santa Cruz, California. Our funders and clients includes: The Ford Foundation, The Wikimedia Foundation, The Rose Foundation, Humanity United, Amnesty International, UC Berkeley, Meta, OpenAI, and more.