Portrait of Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Senior Principal Researcher

About

Hi! I’m Jenn Wortman Vaughan (opens in new tab), a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, NYC.

I work on responsible AI (opens in new tab)—specifically transparency, interpretability, and fairness of AI systems—as part of Microsoft’s FATE group (opens in new tab) and Co-Chair of Microsoft’s Aether (opens in new tab) working group on transparency. I am interested in the interaction between people and AI, and in the past often studied this interaction in the context of prediction markets and other crowdsourcing systems. My passion is for AI that augments, rather than replaces, human abilities. My research background is in machine learning and algorithmic economics, and a big fraction of my work has been theoretical—I like a nice clean model that captures the essence of a problem and provable guarantees—but, thanks to the amazing interdisciplinary environment where I work, I now incorporate behavioral experiments and even qualitative methods into my research in order to better understand human behavior in sociotechnical systems.

I am very active in the research community. I recently served as Program Co-Chair of NeurIPS 2021, (opens in new tab) (Program and General) Co-Chair of HCOMP 2019 (opens in new tab), Workshops Chair of NeurIPS 2019 (opens in new tab), Tutorial Co-Chair of both NeurIPS 2017 (opens in new tab) and 2018 (opens in new tab), Workshops Co-Chair of both EC 2017 (opens in new tab) and 2018 (opens in new tab), and the Secretary-Treasurer of SigEcom (opens in new tab) from 2015-2019. I am a Steering Committee Member of ACM FAccT (opens in new tab) and a Senior Advisor to WiML (opens in new tab) (which I co-founded back in 2006).

See my website (opens in new tab) for more information and a full publication list (opens in new tab). My standard bio (for talk announcements, etc.) is here (opens in new tab). You can also find me on Twitter (opens in new tab).