Rediet Abebe

Rediet Abebe (Amharic: ረድኤት አበበ) is an Ethiopian computer scientist working in algorithms and artificial intelligence. She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Rediet Abebe in 2021

Quotes

• Math and theoretical computer science force you to be precise.
  • Precision of Math and computer science

• Ambiguity is a bug in mathematics. If I give you a proof and it’s vague, then it’s not complete. On the algorithmic side of things, it forces you to be very explicit about what your goals are and what the input is.
  • During her interview with Quanta Magazine

• Mechanism design is like if you had an algorithm designed, but you were aware that the input data is something that could be strategically manipulated. So you’re trying to create something that’s robust to that. This is a wonderful approach, incorporating robustness into the process of designing inputs.
  • Mechanism Design for Social Good

• I never thought of myself as someone who works in education but somehow I keep coming back to it so there’s got to be something there.
  • Her reply when asked how a lot of her ongoing work seems to be in education where there are many allocation problems to think about

• I keep coming back to education because it is an important test case for understanding the broader issues we have been talking about, such as deciding who gets to set the objective function and how it is set.
  • The reason she keeps having interest in Education

• I keep coming back to is poverty because ultimately, whether or not an individual lives in poverty determines their access to education, housing, healthcare, and is therefore a root cause of many issues in these areas.
  • Talking about other area she keeps researching on

• Misrepresentation or underrepresentation in data sets can lead to invisibility which can perpetuate or even amplify social and economic disparities.
  • Data Equality