Rachel B. Warren

Rachel is a PhD student at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where she is advised by Paul Dourish and Melissa Mazmanian. She uses ethnographic and participatory design methods to study predictive systems and data technologies in the public sector. Her work focuses on the implications of predictive technologies, particularly in the public sector. She is also interested in identifying the technology needs of civil servants and is engaged in building and designing technology to assist investigative journalists, public defenders, and fire departments. She is currently studying efforts to use data to optimize emergency medicine and emergency medical dispatching. She is pictured above doing ethnographic fieldwork in LA.

Prior to her graduate work, Rachel worked as a machine learning engineer, data scientist in industry. She is the co-author (with Holden Karau) of the technical book "High Performance Spark," which was published by O'Reilly in 2017. She has a Master's of Information Systems from the University of California, Berkeley School of Information and a BA in Computer Science from Wesleyan University. She was a 2024 summer intern with danah boyd in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. 

Contact: Rachel at r warren 2 (at) uci.