Language Resource Center Speaker Series - Aditya Vashistha - AI Safety for the Global Majority

"AI Safety for the Global Majority" Aditya Vashistha Assistant Professor of Information Science and Director of the Cornell Global AI Initiative, Cornell University AI safety is often framed around alignment failures, existential risk, or misuse by powerful actors. Yet for much of the world, the risks of AI are far more immediate: misrepresentation, exclusion, stereotyping, and the erosion of dignity. These harms disproportionately affect communities that are already marginalized — including people with disabilities and those in non-Western cultural contexts. In this talk, I argue that current approaches to AI safety are limited not only in scope but in standpoint. When safety is defined from dominant social and geographic positions, the harms that matter most to marginalized communities become invisible, anecdotal, or secondary. Drawing on case studies from my work with people with disabilities in the US and India, I show how AI systems both promise expanded access and simultaneously reproduce cultural bias, ableism, and structural inequities. I conclude by outlining pathways toward a globally grounded approach to AI safety — one that treats representation, cultural context, and participatory governance as core safety challenges rather than peripheral concerns. Bio: Dr. Aditya Vashistha is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University, where he directs the Cornell Global AI Initiative, a university-wide effort to integrate global perspectives into the design, evaluation, and governance of AI. His research focuses on building and studying AI systems that advance equity for historically marginalized communities, particularly across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. His work has led to widely deployed systems impacting over 300,000 people and has received multiple best paper awards. He is the recipient of the Facebook Access Innovation Prize, Google and Microsoft Faculty Awards, and Cornell's President's and Provost's Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Service. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington. This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom. The event is free and open to the public.