Dr Maryam Mustafa, Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Dr Farah Nadeem, Assistant Professor at the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education (SOE), both at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), have won a Google Society-Centered AI research award, according to LUMS. The award is for their project Beyond Western Defaults: A Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Community-Governed AI Alignment in Low-Resource Contexts. The university said artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now used for health advice and education around the world but are still tested mainly against Western language and norms. As a result, a system can pass every benchmark and still misread how a woman in Pakistan describes a symptom, or give advice that assumes she makes health decisions alone. LUMS said the communities that AI serves least well have the least say in how it is judged.
The project aims to change who does the judging. Women health workers, teachers, patients, and adolescent girls will evaluate AI systems against criteria that they set themselves, instead of relying on standards written elsewhere. The work will run across two deployments. The first is Awaaz-e-Sehat, a voice-based AI platform for maternal health developed at LUMS, in which women build and carry their own antenatal record over WhatsApp in Urdu. The second is a new speech-based application that teaches literacy and numeracy in Urdu and Pashto to out-of-school girls. Testing the approach in both health and education shows whether community-defined evaluation can work in two different settings, and the use of speech in local languages means participants do not need to read or type to take part.
Dr Mustafa is Director and Principal Investigator of two centres funded by the Gates Foundation. One is the National AI Hub for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a partnership between LUMS and Aga Khan University that builds and scales AI tools for maternal and child health and advises governments on AI adoption and policy. The other is the Global Edge AI Lab at LUMS, which develops and tests use cases in health and education on low-cost devices that work without internet connectivity. She also founded Awaaz-e-Sehat. In July, LUMS announced that the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination had partnered with the National AI Hub to advance AI in maternal, newborn, and child health, which gives the new research a link to government health programmes.
Dr Nadeem is Co-Director of SOE’s Assessment, Insight and Measurement Collective, and her work connects machine learning with education policy. She leads research funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) on how assessment data is used and how AI can be integrated responsibly into Pakistan’s education system. Before joining LUMS, she led monitoring and evaluation at the Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit (PMIU) in Punjab, where she oversaw data systems covering 52,000 schools, and she has also worked with UNICEF Pakistan and the World Bank. She holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. LUMS did not state the value of the award, its duration, or the timeline for the two deployments, so the scale of the funding and when results will be available have yet to be announced.
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