Cynthia Dwork
Professor / Distinguished Scientist
Harvard University / Microsoft Research
Title: What’s Fair?
Data, algorithms, and systems have biases embedded within them reflecting designers’ explicit and implicit choices, historical biases, and societal priorities. They form, literally and inexorably, a codification of values. “Unfairness” of algorithms – for tasks ranging from advertising to recidivism prediction – has attracted considerable attention in the popular press. The talk will discuss the nascent mathematically rigorous study of fairness in classification and scoring.
Speaker Bio
Cynthia Dwork, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Beginning January, 2017, Dwork will be the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering, the Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Professor by Affiliation at Harvard Law School.