In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. In this latest interview, we hear from Debalina Padariya and hear about her work on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, why this is such an interesting area for study, the different projects she's been involved in so far during her PhD, and her experience at the Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2025. I am currently pursuing a PhD at De Montfort University, UK, supported by the prestigious Alan Turing Institute and Accenture Strategic Partnership Program. My research primarily focuses on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, while designing a framework to quantify the privacy/utility trade-offs in generative model-driven synthetic datasets. Although Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) is one of the emerging use cases of generative AI, potential privacy attacks associated with generative models emerge as critical issues.

Her research focuses on developing privacy-preserving generative models for tabular data and speech models tailored for African-accented English. She is also the co-founder of AISaturdays Lagos whose aim is to make AI knowledge easily accessible in Africa; free courses on data science, machine learning and deep learning are offered. She is among the few people working to make African data accessible on the internet. She shares her story about how she balances the multiple roles she plays to maintain a healthy work/life balance. My journey into the realm of technology began in my second year of undergraduate studies, ignited by the captivating images of NASA's Curiosity rover exploring Mars.