In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Nashlie Sephus, Principal Tech Evangelist for Amazon AI focusing on fairness and identifying biases at AWS AI. She formerly led the Amazon Visual Search team in Atlanta, which launched visual search for replacement parts on Amazon Shopping using technology developed at her former start-up Partpic (acquired by Amazon), where she was the CTO. She is also CEO of Bean Path, a nonprofit startup developing the Jackson Tech District, a planned community and business incubator in Jackson, Mississippi. Nashlie earned her PhD from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where her core research areas were digital signal processing, ML, and computer engineering. She has been featured in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CBS kids’ show Mission Unstoppable, Black Enterprise, Ebony, Amazon Science, AWS re:Invent, Afrotech, and Your First Million podcast, among others. She also serves on several start-up and academic advisory boards along with mentoring others and investing in Atlanta-based start-ups. Her honors and recognitions include the BEYA 2024 Black Engineer of the Year Award, Mississippi Top 50, 2019 Ada Lovelace Award, and Georgia Tech Top 40 Under 40.

Nashlie describes her early love for mathematics and music and how these informed her later doctoral research in digital signal processing in music data mining. She shares a personal experience that deeply influenced her work in AI, particularly in responsible AI and fairness, which eventually led her to her current role mitigating bias at Amazon, notably in facial recognition technologies. Nashlie and Rashmi discuss the importance of building diverse teams to practicing responsible AI and building sound products, as well as collaboration with open consortia and organizations such as the Algorithmic Justice League and Black in AI. Nashlie describes the inception and growth of Partpic, an app she started developing while finishing school. She also talks about BeanPath, her nonprofit organization with a mission to bridge the tech gap in Jackson, Mississippi through makerspaces, networking, and community engagement.