Sorelle Friedler

Sorelle Alaina Friedler is an American computer scientist who is an associate professor at Haverford College. She is the co-founder Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Her research seeks to prevent discrimination in machine learning.

Early life and education Friedler earned her bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College. She moved to the University of Maryland, College Park for her graduate studies, where she studied geometric algorithms.

Research and career Friedler joined Alphabet Inc. as a software engineer, where she worked with X on the development of weather balloons that can provide internet access to remote communities. In particular, she has spoken about how biased data and algorithms reinforce social inequality. They created a computer algorithm capable of predicting whether a set of reagents will create a crystalline materials when mixed in a solvent and heated. To create the tool, they compiled a database of almost 4,000 chemical reactions, wrote an algorithm that could mine for patterns in data and provide insight about why some experiments fail while others succeed. The algorithm was correct 89% of the time, whilst researcher (human) predictions only had a 78% success rate. 2009 Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship 2019 Chace/Parker Teaching Award 2019 Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge