Zeerak Talat, Dr.

Dr. Zeerak Talat is a research fellow at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Zeerak’s work lies on the intersection between machine learning, science and technology studies, and media studies. Their research seeks to examine how machine learning systems interact with our societies and the downstream effects of introducing machine learning to our society. In particular, they focus on examining the affordances and impacts of natural language processing technologies through the lens of content moderation technologies.

Zeerak founded and co-runs the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, an annual workshop dedicated to harms such as hate speech and misinformation and have contributed several research papers and book chapters on content moderation technologies focused on the development, analysis, and critique of such technologies.

Zeerak obtained their Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield where they focused on the politics of misclassification and overfitting of natural language processing technologies for content moderation. Their most recent research interests are centred around how distributional thinking reinforce marginalisation, produce an erosion of knowledge, and present challenges to democratic institutions.