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Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, May 2019.jpg
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, May 2019
Alma mater Boston University
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Institutions Harvard University
University of California, Los Angeles
Microsoft Research

Jennifer (Jenn) Wortman Vaughan is a brilliant American computer scientist. She works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Her main focus is making sure that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are fair and responsible. This important work is part of Microsoft's FATE initiative. FATE stands for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI.

Jenn also helps lead Microsoft's Aether group on transparency. This group works to make sure responsible AI is used everywhere at Microsoft. They give advice on how to handle AI issues, technologies, and best practices. Jenn is also very involved in the research community. She helped organize big conferences like the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). She is also on a special committee for the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency.

Jenn is a senior advisor for Women in Machine Learning (WiML). She helped start WiML in 2006. This group aims to improve the experience of women in the field of Machine Learning.

Jenn's Journey in Computer Science

Jennifer started her amazing journey in computer science at Boston University. She earned her bachelor's degree there in 2002. Then, she went to Stanford University and got her master's degree in Computer Science in 2004. At Stanford, she did her first research with the Multiagent Group.

Later, she earned both her MSE and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Her mentor there was Michael Kearns. While studying at UPenn, she worked as an intern at Yahoo! Research and Google.

Her PhD paper was about "Learning from collective preferences, behavior, and beliefs." It introduced new ways to understand how information is gathered from many people. After getting her PhD, she spent a year at Harvard University. There, she worked with groups focused on economics and computer science. Before joining Microsoft Research in 2012, Jenn was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Jennifer Wortman Vaughan has received many important awards for her work. These awards show how much her contributions are valued in the world of computer science:

  • University of Pennsylvania's Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award (2009)
  • National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Computing Innovation Fellowship (2009)
  • Best Student Paper Award at the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (2009)
  • NSF's CAREER Award (2011)
  • University of California, Los Angeles's Symantec Term Chair in Computer Science (2011)
  • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2012)
  • Nominee for Best Paper Award at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (2015)
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