Belén Saldías

Assistant Teaching Professor at the Information School, University of Washington.

Ph.D. from MIT @ MIT CCC.

Google HE Faculty AI Fellow (2026).

Teaching @ UW

IMT 598 Generative AI Ethics

INFO 474 Info Visualization

INFO 330 Databases

INFO 354 Data Justice

IMT 561 Data Visualization

IMT 598 Reading Seminar

See what my students are buildiing in the classroom.

Research @ UW

Teaching @ UW

Interests

Responsible and ethical development, deployment, use, and evaluation of AI systems.

Working together

Easiest way is by taking one of my classes.

ACM FAccT 2026

2026 – Dialect vs Demographics:

Quantifying LLM Bias from Implicit Linguistic Signals vs. Explicit User Profiles

We asked: who gets an answer, and does it depend on who you are or how you sound?

Prior work studies explicitly stated bios and demographics. We show something different. Refusal rates drop when identity is conveyed through linguistic cues rather than stated outright. You are more likely to be answered by sounding like a group than by saying you belong to it.

But there is a catch. The penalty rides on explicit bios, and LLMs that summarize conversations into "memory" tend to record identity exactly that way. A user who only ever signaled through dialect can have it written down as an explicit profile, then silently inherit the penalty in every future interaction, without stating it again.

by Irti Haq and Belén Saldías

paper | slides | ai podcast

Experience

2025 - Assistant Teaching Professor - University of Washington.
2018 - 2025 Ph.D. AI & CSS - Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
2021 - Summer Research Intern - Google Translate Montreal.
2017 - 2018 Adjunct Professor - P. Catholic University of Chile (PUC).
2016 - 2018 Lead Data Scientist - Falabella.com.
2016 - 2017 Research Assistant - IACS, Harvard University.
2016 - 2017 M.Sc. Machine Learning - PUC.
2012 - 2017 B.S. Engineering and CS - PUC.

Current affiliations

Affiliated Faculty, UW’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP).
Google HE Faculty AI Fellow

Conferences & Events

2026 Jun - Paper @ FAccT, Montreal, Canada
2026 Feb - Doing AI Differently, Sandpit by AHRC and SSHRC, Montreal, Canada
2025 Jul - 2 x Poster @ IC2S2. Norrköping, Sweden.
2025 Feb - Guest, LLMs in Public Discourse by Plurality.I. SF, CA, USA.
2024 Jul - Poster @ IC2S2. Philadelphia, USA.
2023 Sep - Workshop lecturer @ Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria.
2023 Apr - Speaker @ TEDx Bentley U. Does AI hold our same values?
2023 Jan - Keynote Talk & Lecture @ MIT–Chile Research Workshop.
2022 May - Full paper (video) @ HumEval, ACL 2022, Dublin, Ireland.
2021 Oct - Attendee, CSCW MOSafely
2020 Nov - Extended abstract (paper) @ CODI 2020, EMNLP.
2020 Aug - Panelist, Mitigating Bias in Analytics @ WIA and Tableau.
2020 July - Full paper accepted (video) @ NUSE ACL.
2020 July - Leader WiML breakout session @ ICML.
2020 July - Poster and video presentation @ WiML at ICML.
2019 Dec - Poster @ WiML at NeurIPS, Vancouver, Canada
2019 Nov - Paper @ ACM CSCW, Austin, Texas, USA
2019 Sept - Full paper @ ACII, Cambridge, United Kingdom
2019 May - Full paper oral presentation @ SIAM SDM, Calgary, Canada
2018 - Panelist @ WIDS, Santiago, Chile
2017 - Speaker, Graduation Speech @ DCC UC, Santiago, Chile

Invited talks and lectures

2026 Jan - Why does it matter how we evaluate AI systems? MSIM Summit @ UW, Seattle, USA.
2025 Dec - Talk, Rethinking Online Governance @ Google Deep Mind's Safety & Responsibility
2025 May - Speaker and Workshop lead @ Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, UK.
2024 Dec - Guest Lecture @ CS, Columbia University, USA.
2024 Dec - CS Seminar Talk @ Barnard College, Columbia University, USA.
2024 Oct - Talk, Designing Opportunities to Bridge Decentralized Online Communities @ Harvard ASML.
2024 May - Guest Lecture, LLMs and us, KAIST G-SCHOOL @ MIT, hosted by Prof. Hyeon Yeo.
2023 Oct - Guest Lecture, LLMs, responsible sentiment analysis, and content moderation in social media @ Advances in Affective Computing, MIT, hosted by Prof. Roz Picard.
2023 Oct - Guest presentation, Thesis @ Intro to MAS at MIT, research highlight.
2023 May - Lecture and Workshop, Intro to ML & LLMs, MIT GSL and MIT MISTI.
2023 Mar - Invited Research Presentation, Community-aligned Content Moderation with Rationale Generation @ Generative AI for Constructive Communication, MIT.
2022 Oct – Guest Lecture, Responsible sentiment analysis, affect manipulation and social media @ Advances in Affective Computing, MIT, hosted by Prof. Roz Picard.
2022 Aug - Talk, ML in Industry @ Agrosuper, Chile.
2022 Jun - Lecture and Workshop, Intro to ML & ML in Industry, MIT GSL and MIT MISTI.
2022 Apr - Guest Lecture, Expectation Maximization and Mixture of Gaussians, Data Mining @ PUC CS.
2021, 2019 Spring - Guest presentation @ Affective Computing class by Prof. Roz Picard, MIT
2020 Oct - Talk, Innovation and Entrepreneurship @ U. La Sabana, Colombia
2020 Oct - Talk @ Social Computing & Visualization Group, PUC
2020 Oct - Research @ PUC CS/DCC, PhD Seminar
2020 Aug - Talk, Data Science in Industry @ U. de Concepción, Chile
2019 - Various research presentations @ PUC Chile
2019 - AI Demos, Panasonic Corporation x 3 @ MIT Media Lab

News and service

2026 - Program Committee AIES, Reviewer for CSCW, IC2S2
2025 - Coach and mentor for winning team @ MIT FutureMakers, NLCS, Jeju, Korea
2025 - Reviewer for CSCW25
2023 - General Chair @ MIT–Chile Research Workshops
2023 - Program Committee FAcct2023
2022 - Board @ Women in Machine Learning (WiML)
2022 - Volunteer @ MIT Path of Professorship
2022 - Program Committee @ Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping, KDD
2022 Winter - Teaching Workshop Facilitator at MIT TLL
2020 - Logistics Co-Chair @ WiML at NeurIPS (Gather architecture & Funding Program)
2020-21 - Reviewer for CHI21, CSCW21
2020 Fall - TA for Understanding Public Thought, MIT & UW-Madison
2020 - Super-volunteer @ WiML at ICML
2020 - Reviewer for the ICML Deploy and Monitor ML workshop
2020-21 - Hall Council Chair, MIT Sidney Pacific Grad Community
2019 - Reviewer for the 14th NeurIPS WiML workshop
2019 Fall - Grad TA for machine learning class at EECS, MIT

Grants

2026 - (finalist) Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge
2025 - Strategic Research Fund, University of Washington, ($13K)
2023 - $30K to host 100 students and speakers at MIT-Chile Conf.
2022 - Travel Grants, MIT Media Lab ($2K).
2021 - 2023 MIT Teaching Development Fellowship ($4K).
2019 - Travel Grants, MIT Media Lab ($6K) and WiML ($1K).

Awards

2026 - Google HE Faculty AI Fellowship
2023 - MIT Women of Excellence Award, MIT, USA.
2018 - Highest Teaching Quality. Data Mining core course. Engineering School. PUC, Chle.
2017 - Best Computer Science Thesis Award. PUC, Chile.
2016, 2017 - Master Degree Excellence Scholarship. PUC, Chile.
2015 - Best Teaching Assistant. Engineering School. PUC, Chile.
2012 - Honor enrollment - Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. PUC, Chile.
2012 - National Math Top Score. Government of Chile.

Main Printed Media

2024 - Featured in exhibition. Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin, Germany
2023 - Diario Financiero, DF MAS, Chile
2022 - El Mercurio main section, Chile, 2022 (link, pdf)
2020 - El Mercurio cover and innovation section, Chile, 2020 (pdf, La Segunda
2019 - MIT Media Lab en español, La Razón, España
2019 - Emociones en Twitter, El País, España

Belén Saldías

Teaching @ UW

Teaching @ UW

Research @ UW

Teaching @ UW

ACM FAccT 2026

TEDx