Welcome. I'm Anna Dixon — applied research scientist and the founder of Datafoss.
I work at the intersection of AI and high-stakes domains: global health, education, and social impact. My focus is building AI-powered tools that work reliably in the real world and helping organizations measure and improve that reliability through rigorous evaluation. ("It worked great when I tried it" is not sufficient. I've made a career of proving this, gently.)
I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and more than a decade of experience in AI, machine learning, and data science. Most recently, I spent three years as an Applied Research Scientist at Dimagi, leading research on LLM-powered health chatbots in low-resource languages and building evaluation frameworks for generative AI in global health. I presented that work at OpenAI DevDay San Francisco 2024 — one of eleven accepted talks.
The through-line across my career — from predicting child malnutrition in India to integrating health information systems in Malawi — is that the hard problem is rarely the technology. It's making the system work in conditions it wasn't designed for. The world is full of those conditions.
I founded Datafoss to offer organizations a partner who brings research-grade rigor to applied AI problems, and who won't mistake a good demo for a working tool.
If you're building AI-powered tools and need help evaluating whether they actually work, adapting them for constrained environments, or translating research into something deployable — that's exactly the work I do. I'd love to hear what you're building — and talk about how I can help.