Aylin Caliskan

Career

Before joining the University of Washington, Aylin Caliskan was a postdoctoral researcher and fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and then an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University. At UW, Caliskan was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Information School, holds an adjunct appointment in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and co-directs the Tech Policy Lab.³¹

In 2021 Caliskan was appointed a Nonresident Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, in its Center for Technology Innovation. Caliskan is a program co-chair of the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026), held in October 2026.³¹

Research

Caliskan develops evaluation methods and mitigation techniques to make the societal impacts of AI systems more transparent, working across natural language processing, multimodal machine learning and human-AI collaboration. The 2016 paper "Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases", written with Joanna J. Bryson and Arvind Narayanan, showed that word embeddings trained on ordinary web text reproduce biases measured by the Implicit Association Test.³²

Caliskan's recent publications study bias in vision-language models and text-to-image generators, the influence of biased AI recommendations on human hiring decisions, and the safety of language-model agents. Examples include VIGNETTE, a socially grounded bias evaluation for vision-language models at ACL 2026, and work on personalized safety in large language models at NeurIPS 2025.¹

Work and contributions

• Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases Published research

  First author of the 2016 paper showing that standard machine learning applied to ordinary language reproduces human-like semantic biases.²

Timeline

1. Aug 25, 2016First author of "Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases".²
2. 2021Appointed a Nonresident Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.³
3. 2023Received an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight.¹
4. 2024Received the NSF CAREER Award for research on the societal impact of generative AI.¹
5. 2026Co-authored VIGNETTE, a bias evaluation for vision-language models that received an SAC Highlight Award at ACL 2026.¹
6. Oct 2026Served as program co-chair of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026).¹

Honors and recognition

• NSF CAREER Award · U.S. National Science Foundation, 2024¹³
• IJCAI Early Career Spotlight · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2023¹

Where they work

• University of Washington 19 people in the wiki

Related people

• Yulia TsvetkovAlso at University of Washington
• Yejin ChoiAlso at University of Washington
• Sameer SinghAlso at University of Washington
• Noah A. SmithAlso at University of Washington
• Hannaneh HajishirziAlso at University of Washington
• Diogo AlmeidaLanguage models · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Ethan PerezSafety and alignment · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Eric Michael SmithSafety and alignment · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Ian R. McKenzieSafety and alignment · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Margaret MitchellSafety and alignment · Evaluation and benchmarks