Allison Koenecke

Allison Koenecke is an American computer scientist and an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell Tech, a graduate campus and research center of Cornell University. Her research considers computational social science and algorithmic fairness. In 2022, Koenecke was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science.

Early life and education Koenecke graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. As a high school student, Koenecke took part in a mathematics competitions. She was in the first cohort of participants for the Math Prize for Girls, and has continued to support the program as her career has progressed. As an undergraduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she majored in mathematics with a minor in economics. She worked in economic consultancy for several years before realizing she wanted to do research that benefitted society. Prior to Cornell, Koenecke was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, New England, where she focused on machine learning and statistics. She studies algorithmic fairness, including racial disparities in voice recognition systems. She noticed that voice recognition was being increasingly used in society, and was aware of the work of Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru on facial recognition. Koenecke started to perform tests on the voice recognition software developed by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and Apple. She showed these voice recognition systems had considerable racial disparities, and were more likely to misinterpret Black speakers. Whilst she could not precisely define the reasons for these racial disparities, she proposed that it was due to acoustic differences (differences in the patterns of stress/intonation) between white and African American vernacular.

Koenecke was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science in 2022.

Awards and honors 2020 Berkeley EECS Rising Stars 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30

Selected publications