Roya Pakzad
Founder and Director
Roya Pakzad is the founder and director of Taraaz, a research and advocacy organization working at the intersection of technology and human rights. She is also an affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab.
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. In 2019 Roya was a resident fellow on Artificial Intelligence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Prior to entering the human rights field, she was an electrical engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Roya 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). She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Selected Publications:
“Anti Muslim Americans Computational Propaganda in the United States: Coordinated online attacks during the 2018 US midterm elections,” Institute for the Future, (co-authored with Niloufar Salehi), May 2019
Read Buzzfeed coverage oF the paper
“Opportunities and Challenges of Emerging Technologies for the Refugee System,” Research Paper, World Refugee Council, Center for International Governance Innovation, May 2019.
“Incubating Hate: Islamophobia and Gab,” Working Paper, Digital Innovation and Democracy
Initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (co-authored with Samuel Woolley, and Nicholas Monaco), June 2019
Read CNN Coverage of the paper
“Private Sector Roles and Responsibilities: Protecting Quality of Discourse, Diversity of Content and Civic Engagement on Digital Platforms and Social Media," Governance Innovation for a Connected World, Center for International Governance Innovation, (co-authored with Rebecca MacKinnon), November 2018
Her full CV can be found here.
Email: rpakzad@taraazresearch.org
Twitter: @RoyaPak
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