Elham Tabassi

Elham Tabassi is the director the Brookings Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative and senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program. She joined Brookings following a distinguished career at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), where she most recently served as the NIST’s chief AI advisor, leading its AI Innovation Lab, which aims to cultivate trust in the design, development, and use of AI technologies. At Brookings, her research focuses on preparing people and society for the AI-driven future.

Tabassi spent more than 25 years in the civil service, leading research, evaluations  and standards development initiatives on AI, machine learning, and computer vision systems. She started at NIST in 1999 as a bench scientist before becoming the Chief of Staff and then Associate Director for Emerging Technologies of its Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). In 2018, she led the creation of NIST’s AI Innovation Lab and grew NIST’s AI program into a globally respected leader in international debates on AI standards and policy. Among her many notable achievements at NIST, she was the lead author of its widely adopted AI Risk Management Framework, invented an algorithm for fingerprint image quality assessment that is now a global standard, and served as the first U.S. federal AI standards coordinator. In 2023, TIME named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Tabassi has been working on various machine learning and computer vision research projects with applications in biometrics evaluation and standards since she joined NIST. As the Associate Director for Emerging Technologies at NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), Tabassi assisted NIST leadership and management at all levels in determining future strategic direction for research, development, standards, testing and evaluation in the areas of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. She also coordinated interaction related to artificial intelligence with the U.S. research community, U.S. industrial community, international standards community, and other federal agencies; and provided leadership within NIST in the use of AI to solve scientific and engineering problems arising in measurement science and related use-inspired applications of AI.

Outside of NIST, she served as a member of the National AI Resource Research Task Force, co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Machine Learning and AI Subcommittee, and co-chair of FIDO (“Fast IDentity Online”) Alliance’s Biometric Subgroup. She remains a vice-chair of OECD working party on AI Governance, Associate Editor of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a fellow of Washington Academy of Sciences, and a senior member of IEEE and member of ISO subcommittees on biometrics and artificial intelligence.

Tabassi holds a Master of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Santa Clara University and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology.