Professor of computer science, Princeton University
Director, Center for Information Technology Policy
I study the societal impact of digital technologies, especially AI.
Publications Advising Teaching Talks Bio
Professor of computer science, Princeton University
Director, Center for Information Technology Policy
I study the societal impact of digital technologies, especially AI.
My new book with Sayash Kapoor cuts through AI hype and gives you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t. Get it from Amazon, Bookshop, etc. It is one of Nature's 10 best books of 2024 and one of Forbes's 10 must-read tech books of 2024.
The book is based on years of research on limits to prediction, the dangers of predictive decision making, the reproducibility crisis in machine learning based science, the limits of large language models, and the risks of social media algorithms.
Our AI Snake Oil newsletter is read by 60,000 researchers, policy makers, journalists, and AI enthusiasts. Subscribe here. We were recognized for the newsletter on the TIME 100 AI list.
For 2022-23 I was a visiting senior researcher at Columbia's Knight First Amendment Institute, studying how social media algorithms amplify some speech and suppress others. My capstone essay: Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms.
I co-organized a symposium on algorithmic amplification in April 2022 at Columbia University. Watch the videos here.
I coauthored a textbook on fairness and machine learning, available online. My work was among the first to rigorously show how machine learning reflects racial, gender, and other cultural biases. I've also worked on exposing dark patterns online.
I led Princeton's Web Transparency and Accountability Project. Through large-scale, automated web measurement, we uncovered how companies collect and use our personal information. Our open-source tool OpenWPM has enabled over 100 studies of web privacy.
I led the creation of an online course / textbook on cryptocurrencies which has been used in over 150 courses worldwide.
My main interest these days is helping shape public policy to counter the harms of cryptocurrency.
I've shown how sensitive information can be inferred from seemingly innocuous "anonymized" data, ranging from browsing histories to genomes. See this primer of the research and this policy piece on what it means for privacy.