Dr. Chowdhury is the Chief Scientist of Parity Consulting, Founder and General Partner of Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Previously, Dr. Chowdhury was the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Prior to Twitter, she was CEO and founder of Parity AI, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She built and led Accenture’s practice in Responsible AI.

She serves on multiple boards, including Oxford University’s Commission on AI and Governance, the UK’s Center for Data Ethics and Governance, the University of Virginia’s Data Science Program, and Patterns, a data science journal by the publishers of Cell. She is also UN Commissioner on the Broadband Commission.

She is an active contributor to discourse around responsible technology with bylines in The Atlantic, Wired, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat.

Rumman has been featured in international media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Australian Broadcasting Channel and Nikkei Business Times.

She was named one of BBC’s 100 Women, recognized as one of the Bay Area’s Top 40 under 40, and a member of the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). She has also been named by Forbes as one of Five Who are Shaping AI.

Dr. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master’s degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Desiree was Group Sustainability Officer at DWS Group, when she exposed what she considered to be extensive greenwashing - huge discrepancies between the firm’s public ESG claims and its internal statements and actions. When her concerns as well as her job were dismissed by the C-suite and Board, she decided to speak out publicly. US and German authorities launched investigations, which culminated in a police raid at DWS’s headquarters and the ousting of the CEO as well as many other senior figures at DWS and Deutsche Bank. 

Desiree’s whistleblowing action sent shockwaves throughout the finance industry and galvanized efforts to tackle greenwashing. She poignantly and candidly tells her story to drive this cautionary yet inspirational tale home for the sake of clearer ESG disclosures and a more evidence-based approach to sustainability. 

As a frequent media commentator and keynote speaker, Desiree opens up about the three acts to her story: spotting the greenwashing, getting fired and whistleblowing, and industry-wide lessons learned and her professional revival. 

Desiree has over twenty-five years of experience in sustainable finance and investment banking. Previous to DWS, she held senior roles at JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Zais Group, where she built and managed ESG investing and structured credit businesses. Her track record of product innovation includes several award-winning and market transformational products, including the development of the iTraxx and CDX indices, as well as a series of impact securitisations. 

Desiree holds a BSc Economics (Hons) from the London School of Economics. She is a member of the CFA’s ESG Technical Committee, a member of the LSE’s Entrepreneurship Advisory Group and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Responsible Investing.

Alla is a senior analyst at Forrester serving security and risk professionals. She covers governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), third-party risk management (TPRM), contract lifecycle management (CLM), and supply chain risk with a special focus on risk management frameworks. In this role, Alla helps Forrester clients establish strategy, adopt best practices, define a governance framework, and select technology to manage risk, improve business resilience, and strategic value-add. Her research also includes ethics and trust in digital transformation, enterprise risk management (ERM), and protecting the organization’s brand.

Her 25 years of B2B marketing experience includes marketing leadership and strategy, product marketing, and digital and customer marketing. Alla’s risk management experience comes from marketing, strategy, and customer advocate roles where she helped launch successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and oversaw all aspects of brand development, go-to-market, messaging and positioning, and digital marketing. In these roles, she ran marketing strategy and product marketing.

Alla holds an BA in English from Hofstra University and has completed the Business Analytics Program at Harvard with distinction.