Our current data ecosystem leaves individuals, groups, and society vulnerable to a wide range of harms, ranging from privacy violations to subversion of autonomy to discrimination to erosion of trust in institutions. In this talk, the Data Co-ops Project, a multi-institution, multi-disciplinary effort co-led with Kobbi Nissim will be discussed. The Project seeks to organize our understanding of these harms and to coordinate a set of technical and legal approaches to addressing them. In particular, recent joint work with Ayelet Gordon and Alex Wood will be presented, wherein we argue that legal and technical tools aimed at controlling data and addressing privacy concerns are inherently insufficient for addressing the full range of these harms.

Bio:

Katrina Ligett is a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University, where she is also the head of the program on the Interfaces of Technology, Society, and Networks (formerly known as Internet & Society), an elected member of the Federmann Study for the Center of Rationality, and an affiliate of the Federmann Cyber Security Research Center. Before joining the Hebrew University, she was faculty in computer science and economics at Caltech. Her primary research interests are in data privacy, algorithmic fairness, machine learning theory, and algorithmic game theory. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 and did her postdoc at Cornell University. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship. Ligett was the co-chair of the 2021 International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT) and the chair of the 2021 Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC). She currently serves as an advisory board member to the Harvard University OpenDP Project, and as an associate editor at the journals TheoretiCS and Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC). She is also an executive board member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom) and a principal investigator in the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Theory of Algorithmic Fairness. Ligett is the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) Microsoft Visiting Professor.