I am currently a partner research manager at Microsoft Research New York City. I am also an adjunct professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst and a member of UMass Amherst's Computational Social Science Institute. I have a BA in computer science from the University of Cambridge, an MS in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge.
My research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning. I collaborate with researchers from machine learning, natural language processing, human–computer interaction, and science and technology studies, as well as lawyers and policy makers; my research integrates both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Previously, I developed machine learning and natural language processing methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. I collaborated with political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and others to understand how organizations function by analyzing publicly available interaction data, including email networks, document collections, press releases, meeting transcripts, and news articles. This work was supported by several NSF grants, an IARPA grant, and a grant from the OJJDP.
For almost two decades, I have worked to address the underrepresentation of women in computing. To this end, I've co-founded several organizations, including the annual Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop and two organizations—the Debian Women Project and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (now expanded into Outreachy)—that focus on increasing women's participation in free and open source software development.
My research has had broad impact in computer science and in the social sciences. My co-authors and I have won best paper awards at AISTATS, CHI, and NAACL. In 2014, I was named one of Glamour magazine's "35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry." In 2016, I was named co-winner of the Borg Early Career Award. I served as the senior program chair for the NeurIPS 2018 conference and as the general chair for the NeurIPS 2019 conference. I currently serve on the NeurIPS Executive Board, the ICML Board, the FAccT Steering Committee, the WiML Senior Advisory Council, and the WiNLP Advisory Board.
Finally, I believe I am the only person to have appeared in both Linux Format and Glamour.
Oh, and I really like sloths.