When Dr Muneera Bano learnt her team had been named among the 50 finalists for the Australian Museum Eureka Prize, the emotion caught her off guard.
“I cannot say how emotional it was,” she tells The Indian Sun. “It meant a very big achievement. Whether I win or not, even coming to this point is very meaningful.”
If she does win, she already knows who the award will be dedicated to. “I would dedicate it to my mum. All my achievements are because of her. She was never given the opportunities I had, so she lived her dreams through me.”
It is a dedication that carries the full weight of Dr Bano’s remarkable journey. Born in Islamabad to a Pashtun family, she grew up in a culture where women of her mother’s generation were not allowed to go to school.
“I am the only woman in my entire extended family with a PhD, and in a male-dominated field,” she says. “For men in our culture, education was never an issue. Even my brothers had every opportunity, but none pursued a PhD. For me, it came from within. When you’re denied something you’re passionate about, you work even harder for it.”
Dr Bano leads the AI Diversity and Inclusion team at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, where her research focuses on identifying and preventing bias in artificial intelligence systems before those systems cause real-world harm. It is work that sits at the intersection of software engineering and social justice – two fields that might seem worlds apart but which she now sees as two sides of the same coin.
The Eureka nomination recognises four years of research that has already begun to shape government policy. The team’s guidelines on diversity and inclusion in AI were referenced in Australia’s National AI Assurance Framework, and a second version of those guidelines has since been completed, with a public release expected soon.
The work addresses a problem that many people encounter without realising it. When an AI system makes a decision such as on who gets a job interview, who is approved for a credit card, whose face is recognised by law enforcement, it draws on patterns from historical data. If that data reflects past discrimination, the AI repeats and often amplifies it.
“AI learns from the past, what is available to it,” Dr Bano explains. “If there is a pattern of discrimination in the data, it can repeat those decisions statistically not because of merit, but because of who you are, which postcode you come from, or which university you went to.”
The examples are not hypothetical. Amazon had to take down its AI-based hiring tool after it was found to be systematically discriminating against women for technical roles. Facial recognition systems in the United States have led to wrongful arrests of dark-skinned individuals. And in a recent experiment Dr Bano’s team conducted, they asked multiple generative AI systems to draw a software engineer. Every image produced was a young white man in the stereotypical Silicon Valley mould.
“Me and my colleague were thinking – we have PhDs in this domain, and it’s not reflecting us at all,” she says.
The harms, she notes, are not limited to a single sector. Her team has worked with SEEK on inclusive AI in recruitment, with the Australian Sports Commission on Responsible AI use in Australian community and elite sports, and with Beyond Blue on how AI is increasingly being used in mental health services – sometimes by people who do not fully understand what they are engaging with.
“Wherever there is an AI, there could be potential for harm. And because it’s a tool with a lot of power, it can amplify all those biases on scale.”
The answer, she argues, is not to slow down AI development but to build inclusion into the design process from the very beginning. “By the time you try to rectify things after the fact, the damage has already been done. You need to consider how to minimise harm before you deploy the system, not after.”
It is a philosophy shaped as much by lived experience as by research. Coming to Australia as an international student, navigating a male-dominated field, building a career far from home and family – Dr Bano has spent much of her life pushing through barriers that others did not have to face.
“Coming from that background, as an international student, I was already an outsider. In any room where people are talking about diversity and inclusion, I see mostly women or people from ethnic backgrounds, those who know what it means.”
She came to CSIRO four years ago after positions at Swinburne University and Deakin University, joining a team being formed by her PhD supervisor Dr Deedar (IS THE NAME CORRECT. A year ago, she took over as team lead when Professor Didar stepped down.
Her message to young women and girls from multicultural backgrounds is simple: “Once you set your mind on something, the decision is yours and how hard you are going to work to achieve it. There will always be resistance. If there is no resistance, there is no meaning in it. What’s the story anyway, if you didn’t overcome something that was trying to stop you?”
The Eureka Prize winners will be announced in September.
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