Dr. Cathy O'Neil, author of "Weapons of Math Destruction," will present a talk on "Data, Algorithms, and their Consequences for Society".
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Refreshments: 2:00-2:30 PM, Room 200 Mudd (APAM Department)
Seminar: 2:30-3:30 PM, Davis Auditorium, 412 CEPSR
Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.
