Rediet Abebe
I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. My research examines the interaction of algorithms and inequality, with a focus on contributing to the scientific foundations of this area. I am serving on the executive committee for the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO) and was a program co-chair for the inaugural conference. I am on leave as an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and Master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and from Harvard University.
Current Research Group
Doctoral Students: Eve Fleisig, Angela Jin, Ali Shirali, Ramon Vilarino
Postdoctoral Fellow: George Obaido
Graduate Researchers: Meareg Hailemariam (masters student), Tainá Turella C. dos Santos (visiting scholar)
Selected Recent Papers
Perdomo, J. C., Britton, T., Hardt, M., and Abebe, R. "Difficult Lessons on Social Prediction from Wisconsin Public Schools." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06205, 2023. (Link)
In-depth press coverage: Feathers, T. "False Alarm: How Wisconsin Uses Race and Income to Label Students ‘High Risk.’" The Markup, 04/27/23. (Link)Fleisig, E., Abebe, R., and Klein, D. "When the Majority Is Wrong: Leveraging Annotator Disagreement for Subjective Tasks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.06626, 2023. (Link)
Abebe, R., Immorlica, N., Kleinberg, J., Lucier, B., and Shirali, A. "On the Effect of Triadic Closure on Network Segregation." In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 2022. (Link)
Abebe, R., Hardt, M., Jin, A., Miller, J., Schmidt, L., and Wexler, R. "Adversarial Scrutiny of Evidentiary Statistical Software." In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2022. (Link, Project page)
Kasy, M., and Abebe, R. "Fairness, Equality, and Power in Algorithmic Decision-Making." In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2021. (Link)
Accompanying piece: Abebe, R and Kasy, M. "The Means of Prediction." Boston Review, 2021. (Link)
All Publications
Perdomo, J. C., Britton, T., Hardt, M., and Abebe, R. "Difficult Lessons on Social Prediction from Wisconsin Public Schools." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06205, 2023.
Fleisig, E., Abebe, R., and Klein, D. "When the Majority Is Wrong: Leveraging Annotator Disagreement for Subjective Tasks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.06626, 2023.
Liu, L. T., Wang, S., Britton, T., and Abebe, R. "Reimagining the Machine Learning Life Cycle to Improve Educational Outcomes of Students." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2023.
Shirali, A., Abebe, R., and Hardt, M. "A Theory of Dynamic Benchmarks." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
Abebe, R., Immorlica, N., Kleinberg, J., Lucier, B., and Shirali, A. "On the Effect of Triadic Closure on Network Segregation." In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 2022.
Abebe, R., Hardt, M., Jin, A., Miller, J., Schmidt, L., and Wexler, R. "Adversarial Scrutiny of Evidentiary Statistical Software." In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2022.
Abebe, R., Eck, A., Ikeokwu, C., and Taggart, S. "An Algorithmic Introduction to Savings Circles." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022.
Kasy, M., and Abebe, R. "Fairness, Equality, and Power in Algorithmic Decision-Making." In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2021.
Accompanying piece: Abebe, R and Kasy, M. "The Means of Prediction." Boston Review, 2021.Abebe, R., Aruleba, K., Birhane, A., Kingsley, S., Obaido, G., Remy, S. L., and Sadagopan, S. "Narratives and Counternarratives on Data Sharing in Africa." In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2021.
Preliminary versions in the ACM Conference on Collective Intelligence (CI) and the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), 2020.Satinsky, E. N., Kimura, T., Kiang, M. V., Abebe, R., Cunningham, S., Lee, H., Lin, X., Liu, C.H., Rudan, I., Sen, S., Tomlinson, M., Yaver, M., and Tsai, A. C. "Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Depression, Anxiety, and Suicidal Ideation among Ph.D. Students." Scientific Reports, 2021.
Abebe, R., Chan, T. H. H., Kleinberg, J., Liang, Z., Parkes, D., Sozio, M., and Tsourakakis, C. E. "Opinion Dynamics Optimization by Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion via Non-Convex Local Search." ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 2021.
Abebe, R., Cole, R., Gkatzelis, V., and Hartline, J. D. "A Truthful Cardinal Mechanism for One-Sided Matching." In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2020.
Abebe*, R., Giorgi*, S., Tedijanto, A., Buffone, A., and Schwartz, H. A. "Quantifying Community Characteristics of Maternal Mortality using Social Media." In Proceedings of The Web Conference (TheWebConf), 2020.
Wang, A., Habonimana C., and Abebe, R. "Identifying Precursors to Poverty using the Poverty Tracker Study." In the 6th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2020.
Abebe, R., Kleinberg, J., and Weinberg, S. M. "Subsidy Allocations in the Presence of Income Shocks." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020.
Abebe, R., Barocas, S., Kleinberg, J., Levy, K., Raghavan, M., and Robinson, D. G. "Roles for Computing in Social Change." In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2020.
Preliminary version in the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), 2019.Abebe, R., Corrado G., Crawford, K., Englehardt, B., Glazer, D., Haussler, D., Katabi, D., Koller, D., Kundaje, A., Lander, E., Listgarten, J., McManus, M., Tabak, L., and Yeung, S., "NIH Advisory Committee to the Director Artificial Intelligence Working Group Report." Preprint, 2019.
Abebe, R., Hill, S., Vaughan, J. W., Small, P. M., and Schwartz, H. A. "Using Search Queries to Understand Health Information Needs in Africa." In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2019.
Broussard, M., Diakopoulos, N., Guzman, A. L., Abebe, R., Dupagne, M., and Chuan, C. H. "Artificial Intelligence and Journalism." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2019.
Abebe, R., and Goldner, K. "A Report on the Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good." ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 2019.
Abebe, R. "A Conjectural Brouwer Inequality for Higher-Dimensional Laplacian Spectra." arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.07541, 2019.
Benson, A. R., Abebe, R., Schaub, M. T., Jadbabaie, A., and Kleinberg, J. "Simplicial Closure and Higher-Order Link Prediction." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2018.
Abebe, R., Adamic, L., and Kleinberg, J. "Mitigating Overexposure in Viral Marketing." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018.
Abebe, R., Kleinberg, J., Parkes, D., and Tsourakakis, C. E. "Opinion Dynamics with Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion." In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD), 2018.
Abebe, R., and Goldner, K. "Mechanism Design for Social Good." AI Matters, 2018.
Abebe, R. "Computational Perspectives on Social Good and Access to Opportunity." In Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2018.
Abebe, R., Kleinberg, J., and Parkes, D. "Fair Division via Social Comparison." In the Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2017.
Harding, C., Pompei, F., Burmistrov, D., Welch, H. G., Abebe, R., and Wilson, R. "Breast Cancer Screening, Incidence, and Mortality across Us Counties." JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015.
Trifunovic, L., Dial, O., Trif, M., Wootton, J. R., Abebe, R., Yacoby, A., and Loss, D. "Long-Distance Spin-Spin Coupling via Floating Gates." Physical Review X, 2012.
Theses
Abebe, R. "Designing Algorithms for Social Good." Ph.D. thesis (Cornell University, 2019).
SIGKDD Dissertation Award
Cornell University Department of Computer Science Dissertation Award
SIGecom Dissertation Award (honorable mention)Abebe, R. "Equitable Simple Allocations of Heterogeneous Goods." Master's thesis (University of Cambridge, 2014).
Abebe, R. "Plethysm of Schur Functions and Irreducible Polynomial Representations of the Complex General Linear Group." Undergraduate thesis (Harvard University, 2013).
Selected Upcoming / Recent Talks
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS '22). Keynote
Algorithms on the Bench: Examining Validity of ML Systems in the Public Sphere
Simons Foundation Presidential Lecture
Algorithms on the Bench: Examining Validity of ML Systems in the Public Sphere
BayLearn Machine Learning Symposium. Keynote
Algorithms on the Bench: Examining Validity of ML Systems in the Public Sphere
The International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 '22). Keynote
Algorithms on Trial: Interrogating Evidentiary Statistical Software
Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS '22). Invited Tutorial
Algorithms on Trial: Interrogating Evidentiary Statistical Software
Canadian Mathematical Society, Winter 2022 Meeting. Plenary Lecture
What Can Algorithms Tell Us About Inequality?