Inioluwa Deborah Raji
Also known as Deb Raji
Inioluwa Deborah Raji is a researcher who develops ways to audit AI systems and hold their makers accountable. Born in Nigeria and raised in Canada, she moved from an internship at Clarifai into facial-recognition research at MIT Media Lab, then helped shape model documentation and internal audit methods at Google. Her honors include the 2020 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 list, the 2023 TIME100 AI list, and two 2024 awards; later work examines frontier AI policy and multilingual language-model evaluation. As of October 2026, she is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford HAI and an Academic Fellow at the Leadership Conference, with a Stanford faculty role planned for fall 2027.
Timeline
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By 2018
From Nigeria to Canada
Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, she moved with her family to Mississauga at age four and later settled in Ottawa.
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2018
Auditing faces at MIT
After an internship at Clarifai exposed bias in a content-moderation model, she joined Joy Buolamwini at MIT Media Lab in summer 2018. There, she led follow-up research and helped compile a facial-recognition dataset for audits of commercial systems.
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2019
Making model cards
She completed a BASc in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. Her research examined bias in facial-recognition software, and at Google she coauthored Model Cards for Model Reporting, a framework for recording intended uses and model performance across demographic groups.
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2020
AI audits and two awards
At NYU’s AI Now Institute, she was a Tech Fellow and was named to MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35. She shared EFF’s 2020 Pioneer Award with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. Her coauthored work examined ethical risks in commercial facial-recognition audits and proposed an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing.
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2023
A place on TIME100 AI
TIME included her in its inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
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2024
Two honors for AI work
She received the Tech for Humanity Prize and the Mozilla Rise 25 award.
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2025–2026
Policy and language-model evaluation
In June 2025, she coauthored The California Report on Frontier AI Policy. By October 2025, she was an Academic Fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, after serving as a Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. A 2026 study with Victor Ojewale and Suresh Venkatasubramanian introduced functional benchmarks for large language models across English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Yoruba.
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As of October 2026
A Stanford HAI fellowship
She is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford HAI and an Academic Fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She will join Stanford HAI as a center fellow and assistant professor in computer science in fall 2027.
Sources and credits
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- Inioluwa Deborah Raji | Innovators Under 35
- U of T alumni heroes of 2020
- Model Cards for Model Reporting
- U of T Engineering alumna Inioluwa Deborah Raji named to MIT Technology Review’s list of Top Innovators Under 35
- Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing
- Closing the AI Accountability Gap: Defining an End-to-End Framework for Internal Algorithmic Auditing
- Inioluwa Raji: Meet Nigerian on Time’s 100 influential people in AI – Businessday NG
- TIME 100 most influential people in AI list includes CDSS community members
- The California Report on Frontier AI Policy
- CS Colloquium: Inioluwa Deborah Raji on Audits and Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Multi-lingual Functional Evaluation for Large Language Models
- Inioluwa Deborah Raji | Stanford HAI
- Inioluwa Deborah Raji