Ahad Ali is a PhD candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. His current research interests lie in the history and culture of science and technology, digital media (specifically video games), sociology of expertise, the construction of knowledge, and socio-technical assemblages.

He holds an MA in Sociology from NSSR, an MBA from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Pakistan, and a Bachelors in Science (BSc) in Literature and Economics from the Lahore School of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. He has worked as a reporter and backup anchor in television news (Dawn TV, GEO - Pakistan), and as a research manager for Zara Sochiye (“Just Think”), a DFID-funded national initiative to increase the intake of primary level school children in government schools in Pakistan.

At GIDEST, Ahad will illuminate the cultural and technical black box(es) of an open-access, open-sourced large language model (LLM). Using ethnographic methods, he will investigate the construction of this AI product by capturing the relations and practices of its actants: people (management, coders, data labelers), machines and their algorithms (computers, servers, and source code), and users and their data (categories of users, data, its collection and classification into data-sets). By studying this construction and the translations of data that occur in it, Ahad's aim is to describe and expand our notions of how expertise operates in this contextual arrangement of human, machine, and data.