Sarah H. Cen
I am an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy. My research falls at the intersection of machine learning and AI accountability. On the technical side, I love learning new methods. I use tools from a wide range of fields, including machine learning, statistics, game theory, causal inference, and information theory to tackle research questions. I believe in picking the right research questions first, then using the right tools to answer them. The goal of my research is to better design, understand, and govern AI and automated systems. As a consequence, I also have a strong interest in law, policy, ethics, and philosophy.
Recently, I have written on reducing information-resource gaps in AI accountability; the regulation and auditing of social media algorithms; the emergence of AI supply chains; the estimation of counterfactual potential outcomes under spillover effects; how competing for resources under uncertainty affects long-term outcomes; and individual-level rights of data-driven decision subjects.
⭐ Check out a website that I just released with colleagues at Stanford on The AI Supply Chain. It features a massive dataset on relationships in the AI industry that will be updated weekly, building on past work (here and here) on the AI supply chain.
I recently finished my postdoc at Stanford HAI, where I had an amazing time working with Percy Liang in Computer Science and Daniel E. Ho in the Law School's RegLab. Before that, I completed my PhD at MIT EECS under the wonderful mentorship of Aleksander Mądry and Devavrat Shah, my master's at Oxford with Paul Newman, and my undergraduate at Princeton with Naomi Leonard.
🤝 If you're interested in thinking about these interdisciplinary problems together, please reach out at sarahcen dot research at gmail dot com. (P.S. If you are an under-represented minority in STEM, don't count yourself out. I have been in your shoes, and self-selection effects are real.)Please find my (always, slightly out-of-date) C.V. here.