Alexandra Olteanu
Principal Researcher
About
Alexandra Olteanu is a computational social science and social computing researcher. Currently, she is a Principal Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE) Group. Prior to joining the FATE group, she was a Social Good Fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY. She is interested in how data biases and methodological limitations delimit what we can learn from online social traces, and how we can make the systems that leverage such data safer, fairer, and generally less biased. The problems she tackles are often motivated by existing societal challenges such as hate speech, racial discrimination, climate change, and disaster relief. Her work has won two best paper awards (WISE 2014, Eurosys’ SNS workshop 2012), and has been featured in the UN OCHA’s “World Humanitarian Data and Trends” and in media outlets such as The Washington Post, VentureBeat, and ZDNet. Alexandra has served on the program committees of the main social media and web conferences, including ICWSM, WWW, WebSci, CIKM, and SIGIR, on the steering committee of the new ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*), and as the Tutorial Co-chair for ICWSM 2018 and FAT* 2019. Alexandra holds a PhD (2016) from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She draws her experience from academic institutions and research labs across 5 different countries.