Hanna Megan Wallach (born 1979) is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. 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 graduated with a BA in Computer Science from

Newnham College, Cambridge Newnham College is a women's constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, members of which included philosopher Henry Sidgwick and suffragist campaigner Millicen ...

in 2001. She moved to the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

for her graduate studies. Here she focused 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 Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

which analyses the structure and content of social processes. 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). She worked alongside journalists and computer scientists to better understand how organisations function. In 2007 she joined the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

, where she was made Assistant Professor in 2010. At

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. The checklist aimed to provide clear guidelines for the ethical development of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

systems.

Awards and honours

* 2001 Science, Engineering & Technology Student of the Year * 2002

Best MSc Student in Cognitive Science * 2010 Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics * 2014 ''

Glamour magazine ''Glamour'' is a multinational online women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications and based in New York City. It was originally called ''Glamour of Hollywood''. From 1939 to 2019, Glamour was a print magazine. Due to decreasing numb ...

'' 35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry * 2015 Elected to the International Machine Learning Society's Board of Trustees * 2016

AnitaB.org AnitaB.org (formerly Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and Institute for Women in Technology) is a global nonprofit organization based in Belmont, California. Founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, the institute' ...

Early Career Award * 2018 Program Chair for the

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the thre ...

* 2019 General Chair for the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Selected publications

* * *

Personal life

Wallach is a competitive

roller derby Roller derby is a roller skating contact sport played on an oval track by two teams of five skaters. It is played by approximately 1,250 amateur leaguesA Roller Derby league is synonymous with an individual club or team in other team sports, as ...

player. 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, Debian Women Project and GNOME Outreach Program for Women (now

Outreachy Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those project ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wallach, Hanna 1979 births Alumni of the University of Edinburgh American computer scientists American women computer scientists Living people Machine learning researchers Roller derby skaters University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Natural language processing researchers Data miners Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge 21st-century American women academics