Abhishek Gupta
We are deeply saddened to announce that UNIDIR Fellow Abhishek Gupta passed away in late September, 2024.
UNIDIR Fellow Abhishek Gupta was the Director for Responsible AI with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he advised clients on building end-to-end Responsible AI programs. He was also the Founder and Principal Researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, an international non-profit research institute with a mission to democratize AI ethics literacy. Through his work as the Chair of the Standards Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, he led the development of a Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification, now an ISO standard, towards the comparable and interoperable measurement of the environmental impacts of AI systems. He served as a technical expert and member at the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium, the Standards Council of Canada, Accessibility Standards Canada, the Partnership on AI, the AI Alliance, and the Linux Foundation (AI & Data).
His work focused on applied technical, policy and organizational measures for building ethical, safe and inclusive AI systems and organizations, specializing in the operationalization of Responsible AI and its deployments in organizations, as well as assessing and mitigating the environmental impact of these systems.
He advised national governments, multilateral organizations, academic institutions and corporations across the globe. His work on community building was recognized by governments from across North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. He was a highly sought-after speaker, with talks at the United Nations, European Parliament, G7 AI Summit, TEDx, Harvard Business School, and Kellogg School of Management, amongst others. His writing on Responsible AI was featured by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Protocol, Fortune and VentureBeat, amongst others.
He was an alumnus of the US State Department International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP), representing Canada, and received The Gradient Writing Prize 2021 for his work on The Imperative for Sustainable AI Systems. His research was published in leading AI journals and presented at top-tier ML conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, and IJCAI. He was the author of the widely read State of AI Ethics Report and The AI Ethics Brief. He also worked at Microsoft as a Machine Learning Engineer in Commercial Software Engineering (CSE), where his team helped to solve the toughest technical challenges faced by Microsoft’s biggest customers. He also served on the CSE Responsible AI Board at Microsoft. You can learn more about his work here.