Hanna Megan Wallach
Wallach in 2016
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
Known forComputational Social Science, Machine Learning, Fairness in Artificial Intelligence
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsMicrosoft Research
University of Massachusetts Amherst
ThesisStructured topic models for language. (2008)
WebsitePersonal website

Hanna Wallach (born 1979) is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at Microsoft Research. 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, where she specialised in computer science.[1] She moved to the University of Edinburgh 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 which analyses the structure and content of social processes.[2] 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).[3] She worked alongside journalists and computer scientists to better understand how organisations function. In 2007 she joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was made Assistant Professor in 2010.[1]

At Microsoft Research 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.[4] The checklist aimed to provide clear guidelines for the ethical development of artificial intelligence systems.[5]

Awards and honours

Selected publications

  • Wallach, Hanna M. (2006). "Topic modeling". Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning - ICML '06. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. pp. 977–984. doi:10.1145/1143844.1143967. ISBN 1-59593-383-2. S2CID 1174898.
  • Wallach, Hanna M.; Murray, Iain; Salakhutdinov, Ruslan; Mimno, David (2009-06-14). Evaluation methods for topic models. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1105–1112. doi:10.1145/1553374.1553515. ISBN 978-1-60558-516-1. S2CID 10910725. Retrieved 2020-12-12. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  • Mimno, David; Wallach, Hanna M.; Talley, Edmund; Leenders, Miriam; McCallum, Andrew (2011-07-27). "Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models". Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. EMNLP '11. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Association for Computational Linguistics: 262–272. ISBN 978-1-937284-11-4.

Personal life

Wallach is a competitive roller derby player.[8] 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,[12] Debian Women Project[13] and GNOME Outreach Program for Women (now Outreachy).[14][15]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Wallach, Hanna". College of Information & Computer Sciences. 2010-08-25. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  2. ↑ "Hanna Wallach". Hanna Wallach. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  3. ↑ "Hanna Wallach, Adjunct Associate Professor, UMass Amherst & Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research NYC | Center for Data Science". ds.cs.umass.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  4. ↑ "Microsoft researchers create AI ethics checklist with ML practitioners from a dozen tech companies". VentureBeat. 2020-03-10. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  5. ↑ Madaio, Michael A.; Stark, Luke; Wortman Vaughan, Jennifer; Wallach, Hanna (2020-04-21). "Co-Designing Checklists to Understand Organizational Challenges and Opportunities around Fairness in AI". Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 1–14. doi:10.1145/3313831.3376445. ISBN 978-1-4503-6708-0.
  6. ↑ "Department of Computer Science and Technology: Honours". www.cl.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  7. ↑ "Hanna Wallach Wins Best Paper Award at AISTATS 2010 | Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval | UMass Amherst". ciir.cs.umass.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  8. 1 2 Heintzen, Ariana (October 2014). "35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry". Glamour. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  9. ↑ "Anita Borg Award (BECA) - CRA-WP". Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  10. ↑ "2018 Organizing Committee". nips.cc. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  11. ↑ "2019 Organizing Committee". nips.cc. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  12. ↑ Wallach, Hanna. "Workshop for Women in Machine Learning". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. ↑ "Debian -- Hanna Wallach". www.debian.org. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  14. ↑ "The Women's Summer Outreach Program". The GNOME Journal. 2006-08-15. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  15. ↑ "The Gnome Outreach Program for Women / 18 / 2013 / Archive / Magazine / Home - Ubuntu User". www.ubuntu-user.com. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
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