Nina Dewi Toft Djanegara is the Technology, Policy, and Law Fellow at the Institute for Technology, Policy, and Law (ITLP), a collaboration between the UCLA School of Law and the Samueli School of Engineering. As an anthropologist, her research examines how human identity and categories of social difference are understood by computers. At ITLP, Nina is initiating a new project about the growing use of synthetic data to train AI models. She is also writing a book about the history of facial recognition and its use in U.S. border enforcement.
 
Previously, she was a Lecturer at Princeton University and the Associate Director of the Technology & Racial Equity Initiative at Stanford University. She has also conducted research and consulted for organizations like Privacy International, Amnesty International's Algorithmic Accountability Lab, the European Center for Non-Profit Law, the Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the Congressional Black Caucus.
 
Toft Djanegara received a BA from UC Berkeley, an MS from Yale University, and an MA and PhD from Stanford University. She has also held visiting appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Copenhagen.
 
Her academic publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnos, Media-N, and Science as Culture, while her commentary on technology and society has been featured in media outlets such as Reuters, Fast Company, Real Life magazine, The Conversation, The Objective, and The Guardian.