Sorelle Alaina Friedler is an American computer scientist who is an Associate Professor at

Haverford College Haverford College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania. It was founded as a men's college in 1833 by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), began accepting non-Quakers in 1849, and became coeducational ...

. She is the co-founder

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Her research seeks to prevent discrimination in machine learning.

Early life and education

Friedler earned her bachelor's degree at

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

. She moved to the University of Maryland, College Park for her graduate studies, where she studied geometric algorithms.

Research and career

Friedler joined

Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and sev ...

as a software engineer, where she worked with X on the development of weather balloons that can provide internet access to remote communities. Friedler has advocated for the careful use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In particular, she has spoken about how biased data and algorithms reinforce social inequality. In 2015 she was made a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute. Friedler has worked with Josh Schrier and Alexander Norquist on the application of data mining to accelerate materials discovery. They created a computer algorithm capable of predicting whether a set of reagents will create a crystalline materials when mixed in a solvent and heated. To create the tool, they compiled a database of almost 4,000 chemical reactions, wrote an algorithm that could mine for patterns in data and provide insight about why some experiments fail while others succeed. The algorithm was correct 89% of the time, whilst researchers (human) predictions only had a 78% success rate. Friedler and her co-workers published the database online
darkreactions.haverford.edu/
to encourage other researchers to share their data.

Awards and honors

* 2006 AT&T Labs Fellowship Program * 2009 Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship * 2019 Chace/Parker Teaching Award * 2019 Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge

Selected publications

* * *

Personal life

Friedler is married to Rebecca Benjamin.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Friedler, Sorelle Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Swarthmore College alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni Haverford College faculty American women academics 21st-century American women