Nitin Sawhney

Introduction

Nitin Sawhney leads research on Inclusive, Responsible and Human-Centered AI in the Public Interest. As a Docent in Artistic Research at the University of the Arts and visiting researcher at the Research Institute, he works with faculty, postdocs and doctoral researchers on transdisciplinary initiatives at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts.

Nitin has a background in computational media, human-centered design, and documentary film. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the MIT Media Lab, and taught in the Media Studies program at The New School and the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT). He served as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University from 2020-2025.

At Aalto University, he established the CRAI-CIS (CRitical AI and Crisis Interrogatives) research group in the Department of Computer Science for societally-engaged research applying responsible AI, Human Computer Interaction and computational social science. He has worked on speech/audio interaction, wearable computing, distributed open source collaboration, and civic/participatory media at the MIT Media Lab and The New School.

Since 2020 he led the Research Council of Finland project on Reconstructing Crisis Narratives for Trustworthy Communication and Cooperative Agency, conducted with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). Since 2021 he led the research project Civic Agency in AI? Democratizing Algorithmic Services in the City (CAAI), supported by funding awarded by Kone Foundation and the Research Council of Finland. Since 2022, he led the project Designing Inclusive & Trustworthy Digital Public Services for Migrants in Finland (Trust-M), awarded a consorita research grant by the Strategic Research Council.

He co-founded the Global AI Policy Research Network and is a researcher affiliated with the AI in Society program at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI). At Aalto University he established research areas on Digital Ethics, Society and Policy (Digital ESP) and Human-Computer Interaction and Design (HCID). His work has been published in journals including IEEE Multimedia, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human interaction, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Planning Practice & Research, AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication, and Digital Creativity. He served as associate editor for the International Journal of Child Computer Interaction.

He has led projects in several tech startups on clinical data platforms and real-time news and social media analysis in Cambridge and New York. He co-directed two documentary films in Gaza and Guatemala, focusing on creative resistance and historical memory in conditions of war and conflict.

In October 2024 he co-organized the Contestations.AI Transdisciplinary Symposium on AI, Human Rights and Warfare in Helsinki. He is currently developing a transdisciplinary platform to foster critical dialogues and co-existence through science, technology, and the arts, and conceptualizing a new documentary film project critically examining the role of AI in warfare. https://Contestations.AI

http://www.NitinSawhney.org

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8088-914X