Solon Barocas is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He completed his doctorate in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where he remains an affiliate of the Information Law Institute. Dr. Barocas also works with the Data & Society Research Institute and serves on its National Science Foundation-funded Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society. His research focuses on emerging computational techniques for data analysis--particularly those based on machine learning--and explores the ethical and epistemological issues that they raise. His recent work exploring the ways that machine learning can give rise to unintentional discrimination won the Best Paper Award at the 2014 Privacy Law Scholars Conference. He has worked with the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing under its Algorithmic Living research theme, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on the Global Network Initiative, and the Stern School of Business at New York University on its Social Impact program. He has co-organized conferences on Governing Algorithms (New York University 2013) and Web Privacy and Transparency (Princeton University 2014), and started and continues to run a traveling workshop on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (NIPS 2014 and ICML 2015).
Fernando Diaz is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. Prior to joining Microsoft, Fernando was a senior scientist at Yahoo Research. His primary research interest is formal information retrieval models and his research experience includes distributed information retrieval approaches to web search, interaction logging and modeling, interactive and faceted retrieval, mining of temporal patterns from news and query logs, cross-lingual information retrieval, graph-based retrieval methods, and synthesizing information from multiple corpora. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Political Science, both from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work on federation won the best paper awards at the WSDM 2009, SIGIR 2009, and ECIR 2011 conferences. His work on crisis informatics has received awards at SIGIR 2011 and ISCRAM 2013. He is a co-organizer of the Temporal Summarization track and Web track at TREC 2013-2015 and WSDM 2014. He is also co-organized workshops on Social Media During Crisis (SIGIR 2011, WWW 2015), Time-Aware Information Access (SIGIR 2012-2014), and Reproducibility of Results (SIGIR 2015).