Research: Human-Centred AI Governance

Research: Human-Centred AI Governance

My research asks a practical question: when an AI system helps make a decision about a person, how do we know it is treating them fairly, explaining itself, and leaving someone accountable? Hiring shortlists, clinical triage, loan approvals and student support increasingly involve AI, and the people affected rarely see how the decision was reached.

The doctoral research

I'm a doctoral researcher in the PhD in Management for Working Professionals at IIM Sambalpur, in the area of human-centred AI governance. The working thesis is Developing a Human-Centred Governance Framework for AI-Assisted Organizational Decision Making.

The research is built around three ideas, which together I call the ETA framework:

  • Empathy: does the system register the people affected and the human impact of the decision?
  • Trust: can it explain its reasoning clearly enough for people to judge whether to rely on it?
  • Accountability: can the decision be audited and traced, with a human in charge?

The aim is to measure these qualities, test how they affect whether managers accept AI-assisted decisions, and turn the results into a governance framework that organisations can actually use.

From research to practice

I don't want the framework to stay on paper, so I build the tools alongside it:

  • ai_empathy, an open-source Drupal module that puts the same scenarios to AI models and scores their answers on an empathy rubric, so organisations can check the AI they use.
  • The free empathy assessment, which scores people on the same scenarios and compares them with AI models.

Publications

The research has produced peer-reviewed papers on evaluating empathetic decision-making in open-source AI models, operationalising empathy in high-stakes AI systems, and auditing AI-assisted hiring decisions, plus open datasets on Zenodo. Every paper has a DOI. See all publications.

Profiles and contact

Find the research on ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. If you work on AI governance, HR technology or clinical AI and would like to collaborate, get in touch. More about me.