Agathe Balayn
Postdoctoral researcher
About
Agathe Balayn is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, New York City. Before that, she obtained her PhD in Computer Science / HCI from TU Delft, and spent a few months as a visiting researcher at ServiceNow and the University of Trento (Italy), and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Programmable Infrastructure group at the Technology, Policy & Management (TPM) faculty of TU Delft (the Netherlands).
Her research focuses on uncovering the harms that deploying machine learning (ML) systems into society can raise, understanding their causes, and envisioning remedies. She is particularly interested in characterizing ML supply chains, and in developing practical tools and policy solutions to support ML practitioners. For that, relying on in-depth qualitative inquiries in the production and deployment environments of ML systems, Agathe analyzes ML using a social, organizational, and political-economical lens that remains informed by the technical realities of production. Her research has been published in A* conferences and journals (e.g., ACM CHI, WWW, FAccT, VLDBJ, TSC, AIES, etc.), and has received considerable recognition, such as several best paper awards at conferences and an honorable mention at the Dutch For Women in Science Rising Talent Competition.