Speakers

Rob Gould

Rob Gould is a teaching professor at UCLA in the Department of Statistics and Data Science where, since 1998, has served as vice-chair of the undergraduate program. In 2007 he established the peer-reviewed e-journal Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, and in 2011 founded DataFest, an undergraduate data analysis competition and celebration of data and community that is now held at more than 60 sites around the world. He was lead PI of the Mobilize project, and NSF-funded project to integrate data science into STEM that created the Introduction to Data Science (IDS) curriculum. IDS was the first year-long high school data science course and is now taught throughout the U.S. IDS is supported by the UCLA Data Science Education Center (DSEC), of which he is faculty advisor and Suyen Machado the executive director, and ThinkData Ed, a non-profit led by executive director Dr. Tim Jacobbe that provides professional development and technology resources to support teachers of IDS. In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and in 2025 was named a Founder of the ASA.

Safiya Noble

Professor Noble is the author of the best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination.

Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.

Her academic research focuses on the internet and its impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology.

Thema Monroe-White

Thema (Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic uplift for minoritized groups via AI education, and emancipatory data practices in which critical quantitative and computational approaches are used to challenge algorithmic biases, advance racial equity, and reimagine data systems for the empowerment of marginalized communities.

Evan Shieh

Evan Shieh works as an AI researcher and educator focusing on culturally relevant data science and AI justice. In his current role as Executive Director at the Young Data Scientists League, Evan has reached thousands of minoritized students and educators of color in urban and rural communities that traditionally lack power and pathways to tech. Previously, Evan led teams of AI scientists at big tech companies to study and evaluate multilingual language models using critical machine learning research.

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