Part 3: Weapons of Math Destruction
The last part of The Science Lab series "Numbers Can Lie: When algorithms work perfectly but fail miserably," features the keynote address by Cathy O'Neil at the Technology Ethics Conference 2020. Register for the conference, titled "Algorithmic Bias: Sources and Response," and to learn more about the programming featuring top-notch experts.
Conference Host: Mark McKenna '97
Mark P. McKenna is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the Notre Dame Law School and the Director of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center. His research focuses on intellectual property and privacy law, with a particular focus on the ways different regulatory regimes interact with each other. He has published more than 50 articles in leading journals and was the author or co-author of 5 of the 10 most-cited articles in his field during the period of a recent study.
Professor McKenna joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty on a permanent basis in the Fall of 2008 after visiting for a semester in the Spring of 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center, and the Turin University-WIPO Master of Laws in Intellectual Property Program. Before entering the academy in 2003, Professor McKenna practiced with the intellectual property firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson, where he litigated trademark and copyright cases and advised clients on a variety of intellectual property matters. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Virginia School of Law.
Keynote: “Algorithms: for whom do they fail?”
Learn more about the keynote speaker, Cathy O’Neil, in the introduction by Mark McKenna:
Cathy O’Neil
Cathy O’Neil is the author of the New York Times bestselling “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,” which was also a semifinalist for the National Book Award. She is a columnist for Bloomberg View and founded the company ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.
She earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoctoral fellow in 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 quantitative analyst 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.