I am a journalist-turned-responsible AI researcher, focusing on the human layers of AI by connecting technical methods and socio-cultural contexts.

My work spans auditing AI models for cross-cultural risks and failures (Technical University of Munich; FAccT, CHI), building frameworks for emerging AI challenges (Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University), analyzing AI policy across jurisdictions (Center for AI & Digital Policy), and translating ethics guidelines into practice for organizations (Open Data Institute). My most recent work focuses on embodied and companion AI – social robots, biometric and affective systems – where model capabilities and deployment domains are converging faster than our methods to evaluate their impacts and risks.
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What I explore:

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Having lived across Asia and Europe in AI research (M.Sc., TUM), news media that shapes public agenda (Reuters News), and tech comms for industrial AI and energy systems (Siemens), the work I engage in is often cross-cultural and cross-domain:

• between AI evaluation methods and their linguistic and contextual limits across global societies

• between public narratives about AI ethics and the scientific evidence that should inform it

• between research communities and the organizations navigating use case-level human-in-the-loop questions
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What’s next:

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Currently building AI East West, a voice-mapping collective on intercultural responsible AI, together with AI ethics researchers, artists, educators, and companion-AI developers.

We are currently developing a trilingual digital book with a Japanese university on “AI ethics through community stories” for public educational purposes, and are seeking interviewees — researchers and practitioners working on AI in education (early childhood to adolescence), companionship, history, and art, or non-AI professionals, e.g, teachers/educational psychologists, historians, writers, artists, users of companion AI witnessing or experiencing first-hand impacts. If this is you or you know someone suitable, please reach out at carmen.ng@tum.de or suggest a coffee chat here.