Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Foundations of algorithmic fairness, theory of data science
My research tackles how human values can be incorporated into machine learning and other computational systems. This includes work on the translation process from human values to computational definitions and work on how to understand and encourage fairness while preventing discrimination in machine learning and data science. My research combines tools from the theory of machine learning with insights from economics, science and technology studies, and philosophy, among others, to improve our theories of the translation process and the algorithms we create. In settings like classification, social networks, and data markets, I explore the ways in which human values play a primary role in the quality of machine learning and data science.
The likelihood of receiving desirable information like public health information or job advertisements depends on both your position in a social network, and on who directly gets the information to start with (the seeds). This image shows how a new method for deciding who to select as the seeds, called maximin, outperforms the most popular approach in previous literature by decreasing the correlation between where you are in the social network and your likelihood of receiving the information. These figures are taken from work by Benjamin Fish, Ashkan Bashardoust, danah boyd, Sorelle A. Friedler, Carlos Scheidegger, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Gaps in information access in social networks. In The World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 13-17, 2019, pages 480–490, 2019.
