Hey SMC friends and family (and lookyloos!)

I’m sharing some personal news—and an invitation.

After many (like, many) years at Microsoft Research, working alongside amazing colleagues in the New England Lab, I’ll step away on July 1 to launch a new initiative. For the past five years, I’ve focused on a core gap exacerbating the AI divide: community-based organizations—from care workers to patient advocates—hold critical knowledge about lived experience that today’s AI systems can’t access or effectively represent. But these groups lack the secure infrastructure to cooperatively govern their data and shared expertise on their own terms.

Together with community partners and guided by a foundation of social and computer science research, we’re building a different model: encrypted spaces grounded in practices of shared governance that equip groups to steward knowledge, protect sensitive community data, and shape how their data shows up in care work, research, and AI systems.

I’m grateful to continue this work with coconspirators at Health Leads, flok Health, the Encrypted Spaces Foundation, and the Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab. I’ll maintain a connection to Microsoft as a Senior Fellow at the AI Economy Institute, and I’m honored to continue serving as Program Chair for the Computing Research Association‘s Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship, originally funded by a grant from Microsoft and MSR.

Our initiative is looking to connect with community organizers, social impact investors, policymakers, and researchers who see community-governed data infrastructure as essential to a sustainable and equitable future for AI. If that’s you, please reach out: mLg@maryLgray.info

More info:
Project Resolve: Project Resolve and Project Resolve – Microsoft Research
Microsoft AI Economy Institute: AI For Good Lab – Microsoft Research: AI Economy Institute
Encrypted Spaces Foundation: Encrypted Spaces — Research preview
flok: https://www.flok.org/
Health Leads USA: Health Leads | Health, well-being and dignity — for every person, in every community.
Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab: Catalyst Lab – Microsoft Research

Parting thought: There are legions of people who made my time at Microsoft Research incomparable. I won’t try to name you all—but I hope you know how much I’ve learned from you and how much I value every moment we spent thinking together.
: )