

Hanna Wallach
Partner Research Manager
About
Hanna Wallach is a partner research manager at Microsoft Research New York City. Her research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning. She collaborates with researchers from machine learning, natural language processing, human–computer interaction, and science and technology studies, as well as lawyers and policy makers; her research integrates both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Previously, she developed machine learning and natural language processing methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. She collaborated with political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and others to understand how organizations function by analyzing publicly available interaction data, including email networks, document collections, press releases, meeting transcripts, and news articles. This work was supported by several NSF grants, an IARPA grant, and a grant from the OJJDP. The impact of Hanna’s work has been widely recognized. She has won…
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Fairness-related harms in AI systems: Examples, assessment, and mitigation webinar
In this webinar, Microsoft researchers Hanna Wallach and Miroslav Dudík will guide you through how AI systems can lead to a variety of fairness-related harms. They will then dive deeper into assessing and mitigating two specific types: allocation harms and quality-of-service harms. Allocation harms occur when AI systems allocate resources or opportunities in ways that can have significant negative impacts on people’s lives, often in high-stakes domains like education, employment, finance, and healthcare. Quality-of-service harms occur when AI systems, such as speech recognition or face detection systems, fail to provide a similar quality of service to different groups of people.