Yeshimabeit Milner

Health, Technology, and Race Video

Monday March 8th 2021

Yeshimabeit Milner is the Founder & Executive Director of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 behind the scenes as a movement builder, technologist and data scientist on a number of campaigns. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. In two years, Data for Black Lives has raised over $3 million, hosted two sold out conferences at the MIT Media Lab and has changed the conversation around big data & technology across the US and globally. As the founder of Data for Black Lives, her work has received much acclaim. Yeshimabeit is an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and joins the founders of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in the distinguished inaugural class of Roddenberry Foundation Fellows. In 2020, Yeshimabeit was honored as a Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur.

Katrina Ligett

In Praise of Flawed Mathematical Models Video

Tuesday, March 9th2021

Katrina Ligett is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Hebrew University, where she is also a member of the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. Her work is in algorithms, particularly in data privacy, algorithmic fairness, algorithmic game theory, and online algorithms. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Economics at Caltech (2011-2017), and was a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at Cornell University (2009-2011). Prior to joining Caltech, Katrina received her PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. Katrina is a recipient of a NSF CAREER award and a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship. Katrina has been affiliated with programs at the Simons Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at Berkeley, on Economics and Computation and on Algorithms and Uncertainty. She co-organized a Simons Institute program on Data Privacy in Spring 2019. Her research is funded in part by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), a Simons Foundation Collaboration grant, a grant from Georgetown University, and DARPA/US Air Force.

Julia Angwin

Algorithms, Accountability and Journalism Video

Wednesday, March 10th2021

Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impacts of technology on society. Julia was a previously a senior reporter at the independent news organization ProPublica, where she led an investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2017 andwon a Gerald Loeb Award in 2018.From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. In 2003, she was on a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for coverage of corporate corruption. She is also the author of “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” (Times Books, 2014) and “Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America” (Random House, March 2009). She earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.