Rediet Abebe

I keep coming back to education because it is an important test case for understanding the broader issues we have been talking about, such as deciding who gets to set the objective function and how it is set.

I never thought of myself as someone who works in education but somehow I keep coming back to it so there’s got to be something there.

Ambiguity is a bug in mathematics. If I give you a proof and it’s vague, then it’s not complete. On the algorithmic side of things, it forces you to be very explicit about what your goals are and what the input is.

I keep coming back to is poverty because ultimately, whether or not an individual lives in poverty determines their access to education, housing, healthcare, and is therefore a root cause of many issues in these areas.

Misrepresentation or underrepresentation in data sets can lead to invisibility which can perpetuate or even amplify social and economic disparities.

Mechanism design is like if you had an algorithm designed, but you were aware that the input data is something that could be strategically manipulated. So you’re trying to create something that’s robust to that. This is a wonderful approach, incorporating robustness into the process of designing inputs.

Math and theoretical computer science force you to be precise.