Shiri Dori-Hacohen

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Shiri Dori-Hacohen (She/her/hers)

Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut

United States

Shiri Dori-Hacohen is a  leading advocate for neurodiversity, her groundbreaking “Fairness via AI” research utilizes machine learning to study and mitigate inequities at scale. As a disabled faculty member and Principal Investigator (PI), Shiri is one of the less than 3% disabled academics/researchers. Despite seemingly insurmountable barriers and a culture of intense ableism in academia, Shiri not only completed her PhD but also acquired and managed over $7.7M of federal funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

She is leading an NSF-funded, transdisciplinary team that works on reducing biases (e.g. race/ethnicity/gender/ability) in medical school curricula and online medical information. Her research is deeply informed by her intersectionality: she was the first to define “bisinformation” (biased information), which disproportionately impacts minoritized communities. She constructs inclusive environments, including as cofounder of two organizations promoting women in STEM; and as facilitator of a negotiation workshop for women and minorities.

Her July 2022 paper–published in the prestigious Artificial Intelligence, Ethics & Society (AIES) conference– suggested avenues for present-day AI systems to cause irreparable harm to humanity. She was cited in the “AI Open Letter”, leading to her work being featured in Reuters, The Guardian and US News. Since then, she has publicly denounced the eugenicist/ableist/racist origins of several commonly used AI terms, and was recently invited to respond to the AI letter via an OpEd in TIME magazine.