As a researcher, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat can see the blind spots in today’s technologies, and he’s eager to work with marginalized communities to address them.
He can explain, for instance, why artificial intelligence often fails to include indigenous perspectives, or how a well-meaning campaign to curb digital hate speech ultimately fizzled.
These are insights he brings to Notre Dame as an expert on ethical AI and human-computer interaction — an expert who is passionate about ensuring new technologies emphasize values like adaptability, equity and pluralism.
“I want to work with frequently overlooked communities, including faith communities and communities in the Global South, to co-design and co-develop technologies that meet their needs and support their flourishing,” said Rifat, assistant professor of tech ethics and global affairs.
Rifat developed his perspective at an early age. As a child in Bangladesh, he grew up Muslim in a predominantly Hindu neighborhood and quickly grasped the importance of understanding other cultures. As a young computer science student in a resource-constrained country, he saw firsthand how well-meaning interventions that didn’t incorporate local insights often failed.
Now, as a scholar, Rifat wants to ensure that new technologies are inclusively designed so they can work more effectively for more of the world’s people. He draws on critical social science in his work, seeking to understand and address societal structures, power dynamics and social inequalities.
“When technologists think more inclusively about the people they want to serve and engage them in the design of the technologies, they can generate more effective solutions that support human dignity,” Rifat said.
What would this look like for AI? Rifat said it should include training large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini to use inputs from indigenous and traditional cultures. Right now, he said, multiple barriers prevent AI tools from accessing historically marginalized knowledge systems.
For instance, a community might lack access to the technologies that AI uses to scrape data. Or, it might rely on oral histories rather than written ones, meaning that it doesn’t produce data in a format that current AI technologies can use. But Rifat believes this exclusion isn’t necessary and he advocates for a more thoughtful approach to tech design, one that proactively seeks content from indigenous and traditional communities.
Effective AI might also include more input from people in the communities it is meant to serve, Rifat said. For instance, he recalled a lesson he learned from studying a North American research group that wanted to address faith-based violence in South Asia.
The group’s researchers collected YouTube comments to help train a machine learning model to identify Islamophobic speech, Rifat said. But they relied on a hierarchical management structure in which South Asian data annotators deferred to supervisors who lacked their cultural awareness. The result, he said, was that the people with the deepest expertise in spotting problematic language had the least influence in training the new technology to flag it.
Such examples reinforce technologists’ blind spots, Rifat said: By privileging their own cultural perspectives and assumptions, they risk missing out on innovations that engage communities as problem-solving collaborators who bring valuable insights to the table.
“Right now, technology too often reverts to a universalist framework that fails to consider underrepresented religious and cultural perspectives,” Rifat said. “It is much more effective to be pluralist and co-design a technology with the community for which it needs to work. I am excited to be at a place like Notre Dame that understands the value of this global intercultural perspective.”
Rifat brings recognized expertise to his new role at Notre Dame. His award-winning published work has dealt with a variety of technological fields including human-computer interaction; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; information and communication technologies for development; and fairness, accountability and transparency.
As a Keough School of Global Affairs faculty member, Rifat is affiliated with the school’s McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business, and Ansari Institute for Global Engagement and Religion. He has a concurrent appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, part of Notre Dame’s College of Engineering, and is also affiliated with the University’s Institute for Ethics and Common Good and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative.
Originally published by at keough.nd.edu on August 25, 2025.