New project director at the MZES: Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman.
Eirliani Abdul Rahman is sole principal investigator of the research project TRAPP (“Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection") at the MZES, developing an AI tool to combat child trafficking. She is co-director of the Global Responsible Tech Lab (GRTL), together with Prof. Marc Ratkovic, Chair of Social Data Science at the School of Social Sciences and in the Department of Data Science at the University.
She is also a research affiliate at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy and holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard University. A fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Eirliani is a member of Chatham House and was a former New America Open Technology Institute Fellow. She was a Prajna Leadership and Julio Frenk DrPH Fellow at Harvard and won the inaugural doctoral fellowship from the University of Konstanz’s Centre for Human | Data | Society in 2023.
Since its inception in 2016, she was a founding member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council as an expert on child online safety.
In December 2022, Dr. Abdul Rahman made global headlines following her resignation from the council, speaking out against the meteoric rise in hate speech after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. Her work has been profiled by inter alia, the BBC, CBC, NPR, Slate, Harvard Public Health, the Sunday Times, and Business Insider. Her opinion pieces have been published by inter alia New America, Newsweek, Harvard Public Health, Chatham House and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).
Her research project at the MZES is funded within the frame of the Baden-Württemberg Foundation's special programme for international freedom of science and research.