Ruby Guillen

Ruby Guillen is a retired Los Angeles County child welfare investigator, technologist, and United Nations civil society leader whose career embodies the principles of safe, ethical, and equitable artificial intelligence in service of the public good.

For 25 years, Guillen served as a Children’s Social Worker and Emergency Responder at the LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), working nights and holidays out of the Emergency Response Command Post — covering all 88 cities across the county’s 4,132 square miles. Over her career she assessed the safety of more than 7,000 children in abuse and neglect cases, coordinating with law enforcement, hospitals, emergency medical services, and mental health providers in real time.

It was the stark contrast between the military’s digital infrastructure — she served in the U.S. Air Force from 1986 to 2004, reaching the rank of Staff Sergeant — and the paper-based systems at DCFS that led Guillen to ask a career-defining question: What if technology was built to serve vulnerable communities, not just profitable ones?

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Building Public-Benefit Technology from the Ground Up

While still an active investigator, Guillen earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University (Magna Cum Laude). She put that degree directly to work designing and building the ERCP Child Abuse Referral Data System — a database that modernized how DCFS collected, stored, and analyzed referral data across Los Angeles County. She later served as UX/UI developer for the Simple Notice Application (SNAP) at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court, streamlining court data processes for child welfare.

These projects established her foundational conviction: technology in human services must be designed with practitioners and for end users, not imposed on them. That conviction drove her to become one of California’s most active social-sector hackathon participants and mentors. Competing in dozens of civic technology challenges at MIT, Harvard, UCLA, USC, Google, and Y-Combinator, she won first-place prizes for solutions addressing child protection, women’s empowerment, anti-bullying, and community violence prevention. Through her company, Humanistic Technologies, she has continued building platforms for mental health access, human trafficking response, reentry services, and multi-agency child fatality review — all aimed at populations who are rarely the intended beneficiaries of commercial AI development.

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Practitioner Critique of Algorithmic Decision-Making

Guillen’s frontline experience gives her a practitioner’s critique of how AI systems perform — and fail — in high-stakes public services. As a daily user of Structured Decision Making (SDM) risk tools, she observed how actuarial models, when poorly designed, flatten the complexity of human situations and introduce bias into life-altering decisions. Her understanding of how interface design and data architecture shape frontline workers’ choices positions her as a credible voice on a question central to equitable AI: who builds the tools, and whose lived experience informs their design?

As Technology and Data Science Analyst on the State of California’s Critical Incidents Citizen Review Panel — a CAPTA-mandated body evaluating child protection agencies — she has formally assessed how AI, software, and data systems are (and are not) being used to prevent child fatalities, presenting findings directly to the California Department of Social Services.

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United Nations Engagement

Guillen’s engagement with the United Nations spans multiple agencies and forums, consistently focused on the intersection of technology, AI governance, and human rights. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the UNA-USA Human Rights Affinity Group, where she leads national dialogue on applying UN human rights frameworks — including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and CEDAW — to domestic technology and AI policy. As an Executive Board Member of the UN Department of Global Communications’ NGO Coalition for Social Development, she has co-authored initiatives, presented research, and built partnerships with UN-affiliated NGOs on humanitarian technology applications. She also represents children’s rights as the UNA-USA San Francisco Chapter’s delegate for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Her UN presentations have addressed AI directly and at scale: at the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, at General Assembly civil society town halls, at the UN Economic and Social Council Partnership Forum on digital innovation and the SDGs, and at side events organized by the Global Citizen and Youth Empowerment System (GloCha) — a UN Digital Public Infrastructure initiative she joined in 2026. In October 2023, she presented to YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, on children’s rights in the age of AI. In May 2024, she presented at the University of Pavia on constitutional democracy and artificial intelligence for the International and Comparative Law program’s Young European Ambassador cohort.

This body of work positions Guillen as a practitioner-advocate who brings frontline knowledge of AI’s real-world consequences to international policymaking — and who understands how multilateral frameworks can set guardrails for equitable, safe AI deployment at a global level.

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Democratizing Access to AI for Public Institutions

Guillen’s current work reflects a clear alignment with the goal of expanding access to computational resources for UCs, nonprofits, and mission-driven public institutions. As elected Chair of Membership and Governing Councilor of the American Public Health Association’s Health Informatics Information Technology (HIIT) Section, she is actively building the cross-sector partnerships that translate AI tools into population-level public health impact — precisely the kind of research infrastructure that a publicly accessible compute cluster is designed to support.

Her advocacy within the NASW-CA Technology Council, her consultancy with mission-driven technology startups, and her work across UN digital public infrastructure initiatives all advance the same argument: access to compute should not be a monopoly held by the largest commercial players. Academic UCs, public health agencies, child welfare practitioners, and community-based organizations need equitable access to the infrastructure that makes responsible AI research possible.

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Recognition

• President’s Lifetime Achievement Award, The White House (President Biden), 2023
• First Place, MIT Hack Medicine Hackathon (with Harvard), 2023 — Fatal Child Abuse Reduction through Technology
• First Place, Hack the Patriarchy, Silicon Valley — Best Technology Solution for Women’s Empowerment, 2017
• Elected Governing Councilor, American Public Health Association, 2025
• Magna Cum Laude, Computer Information Systems, DeVry University, 2010

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Ruby Guillen holds an M.A. in Social Work (Clinical, Child Youth and Family) from California State University, Long Beach, and a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University.