Keynote
Rethinking ‘Golden Datasets’ with the Majority World
By Payal Arora, Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University
Today, it is well established that much of our existing digital applications are informed by concerns, needs, and aspirations of WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). The normative has long been white, male, and middle-class, shaping the way we see the world.
In recent years, diverse stakeholders are increasingly recognizing the seriousness of the problem, given the global omnipresence of digital technologies. Some programmers and policymakers are looking for concrete ways to debias and diversify our algorithms, platforms, and datasets.
Challenges abound: how do we account for varied local cultures while building designs that scale globally? In operationalizing ‘fairness’ into building new datasets, how do we identify a discriminatory over a descriptive value, given that data derives meaning from context that is dynamic and changing? What does translating authenticity, trust, and quality mean when we talk about representative datasets?
These are just some of the social questions to technical issues that we need to consider as we translate values into design. Join Professor Arora as draws from multiple projects with Adobe, Google, H2020, IDRC and others from herInclusive AI Lab to reveal disciplinary tensions, and decision-making to address these formidable challenges.
Biography
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of two inclusive tech initiatives – Inclusive AI Lab, and FemLab. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South to help shape inclusive AI enabled designs and policies.
Payal is the author of 100+ journal articles and award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. Forbes named her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’
She has been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award for her work on Diversifying AI. Her new award-winning book with MIT Press “From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” has been longlisted for the 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards and 2025 Silver Medalist winner by Axiom Business Book Awards.
200+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Financial Times, Fast Company, Wired, BBC, The Economist, and Tech Crunch.
She has consulted for the public and the private sector including UNHCR, Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, Google, and GE and sits on several boards including for UN EGOV, and LIRNE-Asia. She has given 350+ keynotes and invited talks in 85 countries for events such as ACM Facct, Copenhagen Tech Festival, re:publica, COP26, World Economic Forum, and the Swedish Internet Foundation, andTEDx talks on the future of the internet and innovation.
She is a Harvard and Columbia University, and Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow alumni, and currently lives in Amsterdam.