Global companies face a modern problem: artificial intelligence (AI) tools meant to drive efficiency across their operations often work better in some languages and regions than others. From English native-speaking employees reaching higher productivity gains from AI-generated insights than their non-native speaking colleagues to fraud detection systems missing region-specific patterns due to data and behavioral restrictions, these gaps create new risks for productivity, fairness, and overall business performance.
Now, the University of Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society is partnering with Mastercard to study how AI systems can be designed and governed to perform more consistently across languages and regions. The collaboration focuses on improving outcomes for non-native English speakers and developing model transfer and retraining approaches that allow AI to operate effectively across jurisdictions without compromising data protections.
“As AI becomes foundational to how businesses operate and decisions are made, ensuring performance, safety, and consistency at a global scale is critical,” said Mastercard’s Chief Data Officer, Andrew Reiskind. “At Mastercard, we’re helping define what responsible AI looks like in practice by advancing approaches that work across languages, regions, and regulatory environments. This collaboration strengthens our leadership in building AI systems that are not only powerful, but reliable, market-relevant, and ready for real-world deployment at scale.”
The University principal investigators include Nitesh Chawla, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Lucy Family Director for Data & AI Academic Strategy, leading the the Data, AI and Computing Initiative, Nuno Moniz, associate research professor for the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society and associate director, Data, Inference, Analytics, and Learning (DIAL) Lab and Ting Hua, assistant research professor, Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society.
The research will work to generate evidence on how generative AI performs across language groups, identifying barriers faced by non-native English speakers, and translating those insights into practical tools and governance strategies for more inclusive deployment. The partnership may also produce research to evaluate federated learning in real-world regional settings, producing evidence on system performance and outcomes while informing new frameworks, product guidance, and industry standards for responsible AI development.
Chawla is also the founding director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society. Reflecting on the Institute’s commitment to responsible, inclusive, safe, and empowering (RISE) AI, he emphasized that “the next frontier of AI is not just scale, but responsibility at scale. Responsible AI requires us to understand not only how models perform in ideal conditions, but how they behave across a diversity of real-world deployment settings, and how they empower individuals, communities, and organizations. This work brings together data, systems, and governance to ensure AI works as well in every language, region, and context as it does in the lab.”
For more information about research within the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, please visit the website.
Contact:
Christine Grashorn, Program Director, Engagement and Strategic Storytelling
Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society / University of Notre Dame
cgrashor@nd.edu / 574.631.4856
lucyinstitute.nd.edu / @lucy_institute
About the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
Guided by Notre Dame’s Mission, the Lucy Family Institute adventurously collaborates on advancing data-driven and artificial intelligence (AI) convergence research, translational solutions, and education to ethically address society’s vexing problems. As an innovative nexus of academia, industry, and the public, the Institute also fosters data science and AI access to strengthen diverse and inclusive capacity building within communities.