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Roy Saurabh
Roy Saurabh

About

I did not begin with AI governance.

I began with enterprise systems in 2005. The question arrived slowly, one institution at a time.

How the question changed

  1. 2005

    Enterprise systems

    Large systems, and what they do to the people inside themIndia

  2. 2014

    Education technology

    Education infrastructure at national scaleNew Delhi

  3. 2018

    Learning technology

    From delivering platforms to asking what learning needsNew Delhi

  4. 2020

    Machine learning

    Machine learning from sensitive human dataParis

  5. 2021

    Data governance

    How evidence travels into policy, and what is lost on the wayParis

  6. 2024

    Doctoral research

    Doctorate defendedParis

  7. 2025

    AI assurance

    Making assurance evidence auditableParis

Things I keep returning to

  1. 01

    Evidence

    Claims about AI systems should be checkable by someone who was not involved, using evidence that survives the author's enthusiasm.

  2. 02

    Institutions

    The institutions asked to do the checking are real, constrained and busy. A method that only works in ideal conditions has not solved the problem.

  3. 03

    Learning

    Personalisation is only as good as the model of the learner, and that model is always thinner than the learner.

  4. 04

    Privacy

    Moving computation to the data removes one exposure and introduces others. The risk moves; it does not disappear.

  5. 05

    Limits

    I would rather publish a method that states plainly which decisions its evidence cannot support than one that implies assurance it has not earned.

Biography

Based in
Paris, France
Email
roy@affectlog.com
ORCID
0000-0003-3439-7731 ↗

I am a researcher working at the boundary between AI systems and the institutions that govern their use. My work asks a narrow question with wide consequences: what has to be true, technically, and institutionally, before an AI system can be trusted in a setting where it affects people's lives.

That question has three parts, and I have spent my career moving between them rather than settling in one. There is what we can know about a system: how it behaves, on whose data, with what uncertainty. There is what institutions should require before they rely on it: what evidence is adequate, for which decision, held by whom. And there is how those requirements become operational, the software, the audits and the governance machinery that turn a principle into something a regulator or a hospital can actually check.

My doctoral research, defended at Université Paris Cité in December 2024, sat in the first of those parts. I worked on machine learning from wearable sensor data to monitor the mental health of frontline healthcare professionals, a problem where the data is sparse, intimate and consequential, and where the honest finding is as often about what the method cannot support as what it can.

Before returning to full-time research I spent seven years at UNESCO, in Paris and previously at its institute in New Delhi, working on learning technology, teacher development and the data governance of education systems. That period taught me something research alone does not: how evidence actually travels into policy, how much of it is lost on the way, and how often a well-founded technical caveat disappears by the time a recommendation is drafted.

I now work on AI assurance, building tools that make evidence about AI systems auditable rather than asserted. This includes reproducible frameworks for deployment-conditioned risk analysis, executable reasoning over regulatory obligations, and methods for testing whether audit evidence is adequate for the specific decision it is being used to justify. I also serve on UNICEF Innocenti's expert advisory group on the governance of children's data, which keeps the work close to a population that bears real cost when data governance fails.

I write here about that work, and about the parts of it that do not fit neatly into papers.

Education

  • Defended 17 December 2024

    PhD, Mathematics and Computer Science

    Université Paris Cité

    Supervised by François Taddei, Harri Ketamo

  • 2020-2021

    M2, Learning Sciences (EdTech)

    Université Paris Cité

  • 2001-2005

    B.E., Electronics and Communications Engineering

    Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra

Roles

Dates are exact. Titles are the ones used by the institution in the period concerned.