Exploration question
If parents are the frontline evaluators of AI in early parenthood, what would we learn by building a shared commons of their hacks and pitfalls, instead of leaving each parent to negotiate the technology alone?
Jina is a Principal Researcher at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, where she works closely with Tim Althoff on AI safety for mental health. She joined UW after 18 years at Microsoft, where her career spanned software engineering, product development, and research, from shipping Xbox One and SmartGlass, to building machine learning platforms in Azure, to becoming Microsoft’s lead researcher on AI and mental health.
At Microsoft Research, she led work on building and evaluating AI systems for mental health across clinical, workplace, and everyday contexts, with a focus on identifying potential harms and designing safeguards — work that directly informs SafeMind’s evaluation approach. Her research spans human-computer interaction, affective computing, and clinical psychology.
Jina holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Human-Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington, and degrees in Physics from Columbia University and Harvard University.
