Hanna Wallach (born 1979) is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. Her work makes use of machine learning models to study the dynamics of social processes. Her current research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning.

Early life and education

Wallach was an undergraduate student at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, where she specialised in computer science. She moved to the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

for her graduate studies. Here she focussed on cognitive science and machine learning. Wallach completed her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. Her research considered language models.

Career

Her early research considered the development of

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

which analyses the structure and content of social processes. Wallach explained that social interactions have several things in common; structure (i.e. who is involved in the interaction), content (the information that is shared during or arises from these interactions) and dynamics (the structure and content can change over time). She worked alongside journalists and computer scientists to better understand how organisations function. In 2007 she joined the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

, where she was made Assistant Professor in 2010. At

Wallach investigates fairness and transparency in machine learning. In 2020 she worked with machine learning practitioners from across the tech sector to create an artificial intelligence ethics checklist. The checklist aimed to provide clear guidelines for the ethical development of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

systems.

Awards and honours

* 2001 Science, Engineering & Technology Student of the Year * 2002

Best MSc Student in Cognitive Science * 2010 Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics * 2014 ''

Glamour magazine ''Glamour'' is today an online women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications. For many years a traditional hard-copy magazine, it was founded in 1939 and first published in April 1939 in the United States. It was originally called '' ...

'' 35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry * 2015 Elected to the International Machine Learning Society's Board of Trustees * 2016

AnitaB.org AnitaB.org (formerly Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and Institute for Women in Technology) is a global nonprofit organization based in Belmont, California. Founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, the institute's ...

Early Career Award * 2018 Program Chair for the

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meeti ...

* 2019 General Chair for the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Selected publications

* * *

Personal life

Wallach is a competitive

roller derby Roller derby is a roller skating contact sport played by two teams of fifteen members. Roller derby is played by approximately 1,250 amateur leagues worldwide, mostly in the United States. Game play consists of a series of short scrimmages (jam ...

player. She is an advocate for the improved representation of women working in computer science. She was co-founder of the now annual Women in Machine Learning workshop, Debian Women Project and GNOME Outreach Program for Women (now

Outreachy Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those project ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wallach, Hanna 1979 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge Alumni of the University of Edinburgh American computer scientists American women computer scientists Living people Machine learning researchers Roller derby skaters University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Natural language processing researchers Data miners American women academics 21st-century American women