EM Lewis-Jong

E.M. Lewis-Jong runs Common Voice, a community project to ensure that tech speaks your language. At 200+ language datasets and 750,000 contributors, Common Voice is the largest open speech crowdsourcing effort in the world. They have run engagements with partners across different sectors, from the Gates Foundation to NVIDIA.

E.M. has led the development of ethical technology products for more than a decade. They were previously on the founding team for CivTech company Apolitical, the AI policy and learning assistant for governments. They led the product development from the concept stage through to venture-backed Series A.

They are the co-Principal Investigator for a $1 million grant on Inclusive Natural Language Processing from the US National Science Foundation, sit on the Board for Speech Technologies at the University of Groningen, the Technical Advisor to the Caribbean Digital Parliaments Project and the Lacuna Fund. They started their career as an Analyst in a public-private partnership Fund focused on reducing labour violations, augmenting public data on supply chains with human source fieldwork.

E.M. has been a Sutton Trust Oxbridge Access Fellow, Rising Star of Tech Nominee, and SheCodes Alumna. Their PhD research in Informatics at the Creative Technology Lab, University of Sussex, investigates collaborative mechanisms of control in multiple-user AI systems. Their first degree is from the University of Oxford.