Finale Doshi-Velez
I am looking for students and postdocs!
Looking for my group? Check out our shiny group website.
Curious about my non-CS interests, including writing fiction? Check out my personal website.
Finally, my old PhD website has many older bits that haven't made it here.
Interests
I head the Data to Actionable Knowledge (DtAK) group at Harvard Computer Science. We use probabilistic methods to address many decision-making scenarios involving humans and AI. Our work spans specific application domains (e.g. health and wellness, humanitarian crisis negotiation) as well as broader socio-technical questions around human-AI interaction, AI accountability, and responsible and effective AI regulation. Our work falls into three major technical areas:
- Decision-making under uncertainty (especially sequential decision-making): How can we optimize policies given batches of heterogeneous data? How can we provide useful information, even if we can't solve for a policy? How can we optimize for the ultimate decisions of a human+AI team, rather than that of an RL agent alone?
- Interpretability and statistical methods for validation: How can we estimate the quality of a policy from batch data? How can we expose key elements of a model or policy for expert inspection?
- Probabilistic modeling and inference (especially Bayesian models): How can we characterize the uncertainty in large, heterogeneous data? How can we fit models that will be useful for downstream decision-making? How can we build models and inference techniques that will behave in expected and desired ways?
Short Bio (+ CV, photo)
Finale Doshi-Velez is a Herchel Smith Professor in Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She completed her MSc from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, her PhD from MIT, and her postdoc at Harvard Medical School. Her interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, healthcare, and interpretability.
Selected Additional Shinies: BECA recipient, AFOSR YIP and NSF CAREER recipient; Sloan Fellow; IEEE AI Top 10 to Watch
Getting in touch
I am on sabbatical until January 2026.
In person: My office hour is 1-2pm on Wednesdays. During my office hour, I will ask everyone about what they want to discuss, and discuss similar topics together. I usually give class-related questions first priority, then switch over to general topics and then back again. If you have a form that needs signing, just interrupt.
Email: I get a lot of email, and my inbox is generally an absolute disaster. Unfortunately, many times I don't even have a chance to read all my email. Please help me by reading my website first, having an informative subject line, and pinging again if you feel like I might have lost your mail. Office hours don't require an email first, and are a great time to also catch me in person.
Phone: I don't have an office phone. Please email or stop by in person.