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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 (health and wellness) 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 areas:

  • 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?

  • 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 characterize the limits of our ability to provide decision support?

  • 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? 

Short Bio (+ CV, photo)

Finale Doshi-Velez is a Gordon McKay 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

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.