Colloquium on Data Deserts and Algorithmic Exclusion by Catherine Tucker

Speaker: Catherine Tucker, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science and Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan.

Title: Data Deserts and Algorithmic Exclusion

Host: K. Sudhir

Abstract: This talk introduces the idea of ‘algorithmic exclusion’ as a source of the persistence of inequality. Algorithmic exclusion refers to outcomes where people are excluded from algorithmic processing, meaning that the algorithm cannot make a prediction about them. This occurs because the conditions that lead to societal inequality can also lead to bad or missing data that renders algorithms unable to make successful predictions. The research also links this back to the concept of data deserts and why it is that poor people often have sparse data.

Speaker biography: Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is the faculty director of the EMBA program. She has also been the Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program. Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data and machine learning to improve performance, and in the challenges this poses for regulation. Tucker has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Her research studies the interface between marketing, the economics of technology, and law. She has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy,  the William F. O’Dell Award for most significant, long-term contribution to Marketing, and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award for long-run impact on marketing. She is a cofounder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab which studies the applications of blockchain. She has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has testified to Congress regarding her work on digital privacy and algorithms, and presented her research to the OECD, World Bank, IMF and the ECJ.  She holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and a BA from the University of Oxford.