Dr. Olivia Yijian Liu

"I am a business anthropologist and entrepreneurship scholar by training. My research brought me inside the AI startup ecosystem, where I spent four years conducting 95 interviews with AI founders, investors, and engineers and interning at 3 AI start-ups. That research became Start-up Wolf (Routledge, 2024), an Amazon Bestseller in startups category.

The past three years after my PhD, while working in tech, I have been completing a postgraduate degree in data science and AI. The transition was fascinating and disorienting: a different way of asking questions, producing knowledge, and deciding what counts as evidence.

The longer I spent inside it, the more I noticed what was missing. Most training data is in English. Most models are trained on biased data. Global South contexts are underrepresented in datasets and overrepresented in assumptions. Qualitative knowledge — the kind built through fieldwork and conversation — rarely makes it into the systems being built.

That gap is why Polyfoni exists. I co-founded this center to bring Global South social sciences into the conversation about AI, development, and technology infrastructure. "