Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, November 12th, at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Maggie Penn, “What Should Algorithms Optimize?” Click here for a copy of her background article.
Penn is Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University where she’s been since 2018.
Prior to Emory, Penn had appointments at the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. She holds a PhD and MS in Social Sciences from California Institute of Technology and a BA in Applied Math and Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her book Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was co-authored with John Patty.
At RSF, Penn and John Patty are examining how algorithms that classify people, such as the FICO credit score and Equivant’s COMPAS recidivism risk scoring algorithm, shape individual behavior and social outcomes. Their research addresses questions such as how society should regulate algorithms and how issues of individual liberty and privacy should shape such regulations. They are utilizing game theoretic modeling, interviews, and historical analysis of classification algorithms for their project.